
2A^^/ 



4l 



JAPAN: ASPECTS AND DESTINIES 




GUARDING CHILDISH FEET. 

[Cartoon by the yiji, the leading Japanese newspaper, on the Anglo-Japanese 
Alliance. The 'children' are China and Korea. The principal declared object of 
the Alliance is to guard Chinese and Korean integrity.] 



JAPAN 



ASPECTS ef DESTINIES 



BY 



W. PETRIE WATSON 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & CO. 

LONDON 

GRANT RICHARDS 

1904 



. vUsf 



First Edition February 1904 
Second Edition March 1904 






Printed by R. & R. Clakk, Limited, Edinbvrgk. 



PREFACE 

The first papers of this book were written in Japan 
fifteen months ago, with the writer's mind innocent 
of a notion that the book must appear in the hour — 
almost, as it seems, in the moment — of a supreme 
crisis, possibly the supreme crisis, of Japan's modern 
history, perhaps of all her history. The author began 
with a hope of executing something in the nature of 
a vignette of manners ; at the most, or at the best, 
of executing a picture of the strange evolutions of 
a great political, industrial, social, ethical Idea — the 
Japanese Revolution. Circumstances — but not circum- 
stances alone, for there were the inherent seductions 
of the task — make him responsible for something of 
the nature of a political, even a polemical, treatise. 
It is true, indeed, that any personal contact, however 
fugitive, with the current of Far Eastern politics in 
these recent times must have turned the eyes of 
any one possessing a spark of imagination, forward 
to the looming of the great trouble which at this 
moment engages the world's thought and speculation, 
if not its moving anxiety. Therefore there was 
always the chance that this or any other book on 
Japan, undertaken in these recent times, might ' hit ' 



vi JAPAN 

the ' psychological moment ' in full career, and, in- 
cidentally, load its writer at least with a suspicion 
of the repugnant guilt of manufacturing a book for 
an epoch — that is to say, of deliberately and of set 
purpose lying in wait for the * moment ' and minister- 
ing, with dubious private purpose and doubtful public 
benefit, to its unnatural needs. This onus the author 
repudiates without length of words. Events are 
chiefly guilty, not he. So much as this should be 
open to the candid reader in the book itself. What 
may not be so clear is the writer's mind and admission 
about Japan. This is that Japan is — incomprehensible, 
not to be understood. This, indeed, is one of the very 
tritest things he, or any one else, could say about 
Japan. Nevertheless, and having written his book, he 
says it. It is his confession. He does not under- 
stand Japan. This is the background of his book 
— the incomprehensibility, the impenetrability, the 
mystery of Japan. The writer has made a book 
about that which he does not understand — not a 
new precedent in literature perhaps. It is the person 
who stays three weeks or three months in Japan 
who understands it. The present writer, unfortunately 
for his hope of understanding it, spent three years 
in it — in close, daily, arduous association with its 
people, with its problems, with its politics. There- 
fore he does not understand Japan. There is an 
Englishman of Tokyo who has spent three decades 
in Japan — his sojourn unbroken by a single flying 
visit to his own country or to the nearer Americas. 
He has seen all, he has been in the midst of all, 



PREFACE vii 

almost he has been an actor in all the wonderful 
events of the wonderful history of Japan since 1870, 
or thereabouts. He is a master of the Japanese 
tongue. He has compiled a great dictionary of the 
language. He is married to a Japanese lady ; he 
has, if I mistake not, a son in the Japanese Army. 
He has just lately completed a work — a Work 
— on Japan in eight splendid volumes — of infinite 
learning and scholarship. Yet this gentleman has 
on various occasions made public confession that he 
does not understand Japan — not quite in so many 
words, perhaps, but clearly to this effect. And he 
and his high reputation were to be less esteemed it 
he made any other opposite profession. Hence may 
the present writer be absolved of the crime of an 
unseemly temerity in making a book about that 
which he does not understand. I have great, almost 
illustrious, exemplars — men of my own race, of almost 
a lifetime's residence in Japan, who have made 
small libraries about Japan without having understood. 
Nescience is always bold, often presumptuous. Yet 
where is the limit of speculation in face of the 
Unknowable .? There is no measure of the im- 
measurable, no plummet for the unfathomable. By 
this token I claim indulgence for my speculations 
in face of the Japanese Unknowable — in plain terms 
for the views of Japan and the Japanese destiny set 
forth in my concluding chapters. I have, indeed, 
pleas, or a plea — besides illustrious example — in 
extenuation of the rest of the book. Wagner's 
saying — I quote it appropriately from one of my 



viii JAPAN 

exemplars — is : '•Alles Verstdndniss kommt uns nur durch 
die Liebe.^ ' Love ' is certainly my plea, with * under- 
standing ' a question in abeyance, for I have confessed 
nescience. But, for these concluding chapters afore- 
said, I make bold enough to claim that, at least, 
they take Japan, and the Japanese destiny, seriously. 
Hitherto the Japanese Unknowable seems to have 
given excuse chiefly for mirth. Because people have 
not understood, they have laughed. Ignorance, 
indeed, commonly laughs, but knowledge of ignorance, 
consciousness of it, ought to regulate another mien. 
Is it not time for us of Western Europe to know 
our ignorance ; to recognise the Unknowable, and 
wear against it a more continent face, if as yet we find 
it difficult to adopt about it a more serious mind ? Is 
it not time in these pregnant opening weeks of 1904 ."* 
I might urge this, if nothing besides — that by taking 
Japan seriously, we at least ensure against Japan taking 
us by surprise. I might urge more, but it must 
suffice that I bring a Bishop into the witness-box. 
After he had written his concluding papers, the writer 
by chance turned up among his notes and cuttings 
a letter of the Anglican Bishop of South Tokyo. If 
by quoting it he seem to deprive his own speculations 
of their originality, he at any rate secures a respectable 
ally for the defence of their probability. The Bishop 
of South Tokyo in 1901 wrote to his ecclesiastical 
confreres in England as follows : ' That the leaders 
here are absolutely settled and consistent in their 
intention that Japan shall be a Western, not an 
Eastern Power, in its methods and associations, and. 



PREFACE ix 

so far as Western ideas are good, in its ideas also, 
seems to me about the most certain and stable fact 
in Japanese politics. But if this is so, then if Japan 
were to lead China, which does not look very likely 
at present, it would only be by regenerating China, 
and this would be done according to Western ideas 
except so far as these are deliberately altered for the 
better by the infusion of what is thought by Japan to 
be best in the Eastern. I do not think the probability 
of any such movement on a world -affecting scale 
likely in the near future, but if it did come, and 
Japan with China became a leading influence in the 
world's thought and government, it would only be 
so because Japan, by taking out of its treasures things 
Eastern and Western, things new and old, had become 
the best leader for the next stage of human progress.' 
I feel that by this Bishop I am justified. Upon his 
reverend authority, by this high episcopal example, 
I am not to be charged with eccentricity in taking 
Japan seriously, any more than I am to be charged 
with making a book for an occasion, because it 
happens that Japan is in the world's eye when this 
book appears. 

The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness 
to many Japanese newspapers, and to all the foreign 
— that is European — ^journals published in Japan. 
From their columns he has drawn many of his 
quotations of Japanese opinion on a variety of 
matters. He desires especially to mention the Japan 
Times^ of Tokyo, a Japanese-owned, Japanese-edited 



X JAPAN 

journal, printed in English, and the Japan Maily of 
Yokohama. He had recourse, also, while in Tokyo, 
to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan ; 
and he has, on occasion, verified the results of his own 
experience and observation by reference to Professor 
Chamberlain's Things Japanese^Gnffis's Mikado's Empire, 
and other works. Acknowledgment is made in the book 
itself of quotations from some other sources. 

W. PETRIE WATSON. 

January 30, 1904. 



CONTENTS 



1. A Spectacle of Paradox 

2. A Fantasy of Mystery 

3. The Metropolis of a Revolution 

4. Tokyo's Automatic Telephones 

5. Manners and the Revolution . 

6. A Japanese Question ? . 

7. The Revolution Corrupted 

8. On the Margins of the Soul 

9. Passive Reaction 

10. Revolution Happily Impossible 

11. The Synthetic in Pleasures 

12. Parting of the Ways . 

13. In the Machine Shop . 

14. The Merchant and his Morals . 

15. The Revolution's Motif P 

16. The Commercial Imagination . 

17. Men v. Forms in Politics 

18. Constitutional Infancy 

19. An Oligarchy w^ith Excuses . 

xi 



PAGE 
I 

9 

18 

25 
31 
39 
49 

57 

^7 
80 

88 

98 

106 

114 

122 

133 
142 

151 
161 



Xll 



JAPAN 



to. Party Politics Pko Forma 

21. The Grand Experiment 

22. Chaos and an A B C Policy 

23. A Potential Democracy ? 

24.. Education without a Canon . 

25. The High School Girl 

26. The Record of an Experience 

27. Mirabeau and Rousseau 

28. With the High Priests of Japanese 

29. Creeds Viewed Objectively 

30. The Psychic Link ? 

31. Humours of the Time 

32. Illustrations of the Revohttion 

33. Spirit of the Revolution 

34. Weltpolitik of the Revolution 

35. Fis A Fis THE Tradition 

36. The Climax and its Parable . 

37. The Crisis 

Postscript . . . 



169 

178 
187 

195 

205 
216 
224 

233 
244 

255 
265 

276 

284 

293 

302 

310 
319 
329 
335 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Guarding Childish Feet 






PAGE 

Frontispiece 


Battledoor and Shuttlecock . 






• 31 


In Arcadian Japan . 








67 


Rouge et Noir 








133 


An Old-time Daimyo's Retreat 








151 


A Polling-Station on Election Day 








187 


In Akashi Strait 








233 


A Shrine upon a Hill 








255 


At an Alliance Fete . 








293 


Addresses — Accepted and Rejected 








329 



MAPS 



Eastern Asia 
Korea 



I 
3" 



I 

A SPECTACLE OF PARADOX 

Despite much testimony to the contrary, you do not 
require when in Japan to consult the history books to 
assure yourself that the country was held in fee simple 
fifty years ago by brothers of the famous barons who 
met our King John on Runny mede ; or that in i860, 
and even 1870, it was possible that a head should roll 
into a Japanese ditch when a vile trafficker in mer- 
chandise tainted the hem of a military gentleman's robe 
with the breath of his wares. The Japanese Samurai 
was a wonder at swordsmanship. A few of the old 
British and other foreign residents of Yokohama at this 
day will tell you that his ' upper-cut ' stroke, made in 
the process of drawing his blade from its sheath — the 
very process itself, in fact — was often the deadliest. 
They used to see it in the early days, thirty and forty 
years ago. 

Most writers of books on Japan suggest to you that 
these things are impossible, implying that a Feudal Era 
in Japan thirty years ago is a myth. They are those 
who stay a month or six weeks and write their book. 
Live in the country six months before writing your 
book, and you may begin to believe that a Feudal Era 
is possible, say one hundred years back. Let your 




^toTt/brtLs Geogmph£aLEstab. landm. . 



London; Grajit Ricliards 



2 JAPAN 

sojourn be of a year or eighteen months, and you will 
find reason to bring the Feudal Era rather nearer the 
present. You may probably then have concluded that 
Japan was a feudal state up to thirty or forty years ago, 
which is exactly what History relates. On the other 
hand, to become a permanent resident is to yield slowly 
to the conviction that Japan must have struggled out 
of the semi-barbarism of 1200 a.d. in the very year 
before your arrival. 

This is one of the enigmas of an enigmatic country. 
One sees Japan in six weeks and writes a panegyric ; 
one worships the most hideous of her graven images. 
One lives ten years in the land and accumulates a 
heavier bill of grievances against it year by year. The 
country is charming ; but it is disgusting. The people 
are amiable, but they are detestable. Where is truth ? 
For my part, I shall presume to say that a person of 
knowledge and intelligence, of a fair mind, and having 
no peculiar or particular injuries to resent, should, after 
a residence of a year or two in Japan, conclude, without 
referring to the history books, that Japan's garment of 
Western civilisation may have been put on a hundred 
years ago or so. The history books will tell him that 
it is only thirty or forty years old. The European 
resident will at the least try to convince him that 
beneath it there is the garb of the bloody and beautiful 
Feudal Era. After a while the person of fair mind will 
be almost convinced that only the history books are 
right. 

Quite lately they proposed to build a living man 
into the pier of a bridge for superstition's sake. This 
was worse than the Feudal Era. A friend of mine lately 
spent a few days on one of the large islands of Japan's 
peerless Inland Sea. With one of the crowds which 



A SPECTACLE OF PARADOX 3 

came to view him was an old lady, who asked if this 
was a foreigner, and ' if he ate men.' Here it was back 
to the days of Japan's isolation and ignorance at a 
bound. 'Way back inland you will be bowling along 
the trough of a valley which might be fresh-fashioned 
from the hand of the Master of Beautiful Things, when 
you may see a lonely peasant frame himself in the door- 
way of his gloomy hut, and lift his hands with reverence 
to the sun, newly piercing the morning mist. You will 
see his lips move and his head incline. He is a sun- 
worshipper. I have seen a Japanese halt in the crowded 
street of a great town, and lift the same reverent hands 
to the same deity. Fifty people might pass before he 
said * Amen ' to his orison, but these without wonder. 
I asked a Salvation Army lass from London, who is 
a * captain ' of the forces in Japan, whether she found 
the religious temper among the Japanese. Said she, * I 
have some of the truest Christians I ever knew down 

in ,' naming her centre of operations, an inland 

town. I asked Marquis Ito — he is a professed Agnostic 
— whether Japan had a substitute for religion, if ulti- 
mately she should abandon her Buddhism and Shintoism 
and refuse Christianity. ' We have knowledge, science, 
culture, for a religion,' he said in effect. Here is the 
whole diapason of human history to date. At one end 
they build a living being into a wall to appease the 
unappeasable — Superstition. At the other there is a 
statesman who is more positive than the Positivists. 
Between, there is everything and nothing. Meeting 
Marquis Ito, you say the story of a feudal state thirty 
years back must be an historic illusion. You see a 
peasant's obeisance to the sun, and think the Japanese 
must have sprung from Nature last year. 

Is it surprising that there should be the deadliest 



4 JAPAN 

conflict of testimony about Japan among the plausible 
authorities ? Her modern civilisation is called a veneer. 
She is elsewhere acclaimed the England of the East ; 
and we cannot be persuaded that England's civilisation 
is a veneer. What if both descriptions contain a 
measure of the truth : 1 have read in Japan that Marquis 
I to still fears possible reaction, with its terrors. That 
would be the veneer peeled off. To this day there are 
old men — once men of authority in the land, territorial 
lords and knightly gentlemen — who live apart, in 
dreams and reverie. They abhor — at least they shun — 
the foreigner — the man from the West who has dug 
the grave of the Old Japan. They gaze into their 
lotus ponds, palisaded from the outer world, and behold 
visions of the past ; they nurse their chrysanthemums 
in secret arbours and cherish memories. But they do 
not wait. They know enough not to hope. If ever 
reaction were to raise its monstrous head in Japan, it 
would not receive its animus from them. They only 
regret. 

The truth — with an eternal ' perhaps ' — is, it is not 
now a struggle between the New and the Old in Japan. 
The spirit of the Old is dead. Its life has passed from 
it, and a dead thing can hardly be an active combatant. 
The Old would have to be re- born in a new shape, 
baptized with a new spirit, if it should ever fight the 
New. But the Old has left its clothes behind and its 
furniture — perhaps part of its house. . These you may 
find in Japan almost anywhere. These the soured or 
disappointed foreigner would conjure for you into a 
living spirit, a masked demon, a painted fury, biding a 
time to stampede and sweep the New from the land 
with a whirlwind of reaction. The ogre — again with 
the ' perhaps ' which refuses to be eliminated — is nothing 



A SPECTACLE OF PARADOX 5 

but clothes, which is equivalent to saying that Japan's 
history since 1859 '^ genuine ; that it rings true ; that 
her new civilisation is not a veneer. 

Nowadays, the offices of many of the leading Japanese 
business firms in the large towns are fitted and furnished 
on the European model. The clerks sit on chairs or 
stools, at tables and desks. The principals will have 
carpeted floors, cuspidors, and roll-top desks. There 
is a public counter with wire guards and glass partitions. 
The clerks wear European dress. Some of the banks in 
Tokyo and Osaka, the two great cities of the land, are 
mercantile palaces — polished granite entrance halls, 
brass -bound swinging doors, mosaic and parquetry 
floors, deep-coff^ered ceilings, columns and pilasters of 
polished stone, counter fittings of bronze ; the office 
air heated in winter by patent American hot -water 
apparatus. But managers and clerks go home in the 
evening to little houses where the walls are of paper 
pasted on wooden slats ; where the floors are spread 
with mats of straw ; the ceilings so low that a tall 
European may bump his head ; where there are no 
chairs and no tables ; where the bed is a quilt laid on 
the mats ; where charcoal in a brazier suits for a fire, 
at which, in winter, you warm your hands and try to 
forget that the rest of you is somewhere in the Arctic 
regions ; where, in short, everything is Japanese as it 
was in the beginning — Japanese, and neat and clean, 
but, to the European sense, uncomfortable to the point 
of impossibility. In the midst of it, the bank manager 
and clerk bow to you in their silk kimono ; and they 
might invite you to their evening meal of rice, raw fish 
in soy, uncooked vegetables, and green tea. 

This, let me tell you, is what Japan is doing all the 
way through — living a double existence, being a Jekyll 



6 JAPAN 

and a Hyde, and perhaps, in some matters, a Janus. 
The New in the daytime, the Old in the evening ; but 
in essential things almost always the New. The spirit 
of the Old has fled, but Japan wears its clothes when 
and where it doesn't matter. 

Take this example in the realm of ideas. Recently 
Japan was threatened by the plague — the curse of 
Asia, which, except Japan, is as a stricken field before 
the scourge. Japan met the enemy at the gates and 
drove him out in brief time and with small loss. A 
policeman at one of the ' open ' ports (the ports where 
the foreign trade is done) was placed on plague duty 
with others — burning debris, disinfecting, examining. 
His wife fell ill — not of plague. The husband was 
informed that the wife was dying at home. Of his 
own initiative he decided that plague duty was more 
peremptory than a dying wife. His place might have 
been taken by scores of his fellows, and the plague 
crisis was not acute, but he refused leave of absence. 
The wife died, not having seen him. The policeman 
was praised. I am not sure that he was not promoted. 
It was virtue in him — to us quixotic, blamable virtue, 
but part of Japan's mental or ethical furniture from the 
old days. 

It is everywhere, this congruous incongruity. It 
is a thousand years of feudal history, Japanese ethics, 
and Oriental seclusion mingling with a millennium 
of European civilisation swallowed in half a century. 
Almost necessarily, the process of deglutition is 
ludicrous, pathetic, sublime, contemptible, admirable, 
detestable, tragic, terrible, and sometimes merely petty. 

In the streets you will see a Japanese husband take 
the evening air. His wife walks a regulation number 
of paces behind him. At home or elsewhere he will 



A SPECTACLE OF PARADOX 7 

keep one mistress, or two, the wife indifferent, or, 
especially if she be childless, approving. Yet if 
European convention is law for a particular occasion, 
the Japanese gentleman would sooner leave his head 
behind than his European frock-coat. The Japanese 
legislature a year or two ago passed a law prohibiting 
smoking by minors, but smoking by women has come 
down the ages and continues. A district government 
recently ordered sea - bathers to wear * University * 
suits ; but in summer you will see Japanese coolies 
on any wharf labouring in a loin-cloth, or less. The 
Japanese, from the day-labourer upwards, is born with 
the artistic sense, but his police authorities drape the 
nude in exhibition pictures of the European school, 
even if by Japanese artists. Dr. Kitasato, a Japanese, 
claims to have discovered the bacillus of plague. Per- 
haps he did — at the worst he was not far behind the 
actual discoverer — but there is no doubt that on their 
temple festival days millions of Japanese pass their 
fingers along the jaws of a greasy stone or wooden 
image of the god Binzuru, and then rub their own to 
cure their toothaches. For rheumatism, they choose 
the particular joint ; for lung disease, they rub the 
effigy's chest ; for disease of the eye, they transfer 
efficacy from the sightless sockets of the deity. All 
the old people of Japan are happy ; their sons and 
daughters make it a law of life — this, perhaps, is chiefly 
Confucian and Chinese — to ease the burdens of their 
age. Yet Japanese lepers offend the public air at 
street corners. Their hideous fate is their own ; none 
will ease it, least of all Government. The poorest 
Japanese bathes in hot water once a day, but the 
richest municipality in the country knows practically 
nothing of sanitary science. If there are drains, they 



8 JAPAN 

are open gutters, out of which, in dry weather, the 
street is soused. Yet the interior of the little Japanese 
house is often a dream of simple, chaste prettiness. 

To enumerate all this category would be to state 
most of the facts and features of the civilisation ot 
Europe with their logical opposites, their natural 
antitheses ; it would be to record all that European 
civilisation is, and all that it is not. 

It is Orientalism and the Middle Ages jostling the 
Twentieth Century and England ; a medley, a revolu- 
tion, a convulsion in being ; the evolution of man in 
a generation. 

It is inspiring ; sometimes it is discouraging, dis- 
appointing, irritating. It is always interesting, or 
should be, for there has been no spectacle on earth 
like it since time began. 



II 

A FANTASY OF MYSTERY 

It would appear that one must be a novice in order to 
be able to furnish an estimate of the Japanese character. 
Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, an Englishman who 
lately taught the Japanese their own language in the 
Imperial University of Tokyo, and has written more 
about Japan — or more successfully — than any other 
stranger, refers you, with compliments, to other writers 
when it devolves on him in his best-known book to 
discuss the character of this people. An Englishman 
of a quarter of a century's residence in the country 
said to me : ' When you've been six weeks in Japan 
you know everything. In six months you begin to 
doubt. In six years you are sure of nothing.' Another 
friend of mine, of important capacities, who has spent 
the best part of a lifetime in the land, and has met 
its people on many planes, sums up the discussion in 
the fashion of this somewhat mysterious interrogatory : 
' Has anybody lived twenty years in Japan and written 
a book about it .^ ' ' You never know where you are 
in dealing with the Japanese,' the foreigner who does 
business with the people in their own country will tell 
you. Yet if you pursue the subject you will find that 
this man, the foreign trader, has an assurance which 
is quite absolute upon certain points. You never met 

9 



lo JAPAN 

a more confident man than the foreign trader in 
Japan — be his residence in the country of one or of 
twenty years' standing — when the question tabled 
concerns the commercial character of the Japanese. 
Here you find a man whose mind is made up ; who 
for immutability stands upon a rock ; who will not 
be moved ; who has forgotten, if he ever knew, that 
our own infinitely wise Mr. Burke has declared it to 
be impossible to draw an indictment against a whole 
nation. Even so, this man, if you catch him unawares 
by putting the question before him in another form, 
tells you he never knows where he is in doing business 
with the Japanese. ' They are rogues,' says he, ' but 
they may be all right.' 

Catch the missionary ofF his guard — the missionary 
on formal occasions accepts it as his duty to put away 
all uncharitableness — and he will say they are a 
mysterious people whose heart is encased in an iron 
casket which doesn't contain it. 

If one can do it, it is perhaps best to do as Mr. 
Percival Lowell did, and write epigrams about the 
Japanese. One does this, howsoever one writes, if 
you believe Sir Ernest Satow, lately and for long our 
minister at Tokyo, and in that capacity acquiring a 
greater store of learning about the Japanese and their 
country than any other man from over the sea. A 
friend of his reports his having said that he has never 
read a book about Japan which he has found in any 
sense of the word correct. It is easily credible, and 
Sir Ernest Satow's book would probably be the least 
accurate of all. Wherefore he has written nothing ; 
only collaborated in a dictionary and a guide-book. 

Perhaps this mystery is the chasm, the unbridgeable 
gulf which separates the East from the West ; the 



A FANTASY OF MYSTERY ii 

Orient, which wins by stealth from the Occident, which 
triumphs by force. Perhaps it is another phase of the 
conflict betwixt the old man which the country is 
putting off, and the new which it is putting on. 

But it is not all mystery. Japan's national character 
is not wholly a point of interrogation. There is, for 
instance, no doubt about the permanence of her people's 
character for politeness. It is possible they may be 
losing it. His manners are the last thing the born 
gentleman loses, and though Japan has thrown over- 
board much of her heritage of the canons and habitudes 
of the Feudal Age, she remains polite. This — her polite- 
ness — is a sweet savour everywhere in the land ; it 
illumines the gloomiest hovel ; it thrives on the humblest 
fare. A jinrikisha- puller seldom passes another, 
carrying a ' fare,' without a word of apology or ex- 
planation. How strange London would think it to 
hear the cabby who whipped past the cob ahead of him 
shout to the other driver a polite expression of his 
regrets and his regards ! Far away among Japan's 
inland mountains you will meet a group of urchins who 
will drop you a unanimous and spontaneous curtsey, 
and often a grave one. The person who is spoken to 
in friendly conversation is as ' honourable ' in Japan 
to-day as ever. So are his wife and his second cousin. 
The person who speaks is as much of a hog as ever ; 
his wife has to be apologised for now as in the palmy 
days of Ceremony, and his second cousin is at the best 
a lout of a fellow. 

But away from this and some other firm ground in 
this question of Japan's national character, what is there 
and where are we ? Can we do more than ask questions ? 
Are these people truth-tellers .? Do they know rever- 
ence ? Do they admire great things ? Do they pursue 



12 JAPAN 

idealisms? Do they know the true ambition and the 
true humility ? Do they know where each becomes a 
transgression of the law ? Do they know to keep their 
eyes on the stars and their feet on the earth ? Are 
they sons and daughters of History, or of yesterday ? 
Do they know in what things man is an angel and in 
what things a devil ? Have they learned sacrifice ? 

Strange enigma ! Hardly on one of these matters 
could even a Japanese speak with assurance for the 
whole of his people. 

You may proclaim on unchallenged authority that 
the Japanese know and pursue the practice of good 
manners, the offices of kindliness ; that they know and 
pursue beautiful things with perhaps more of sincerity 
and simplicity than the Greeks ; that they are lovers of 
their country and behold their king with awe ; that as 
dutiful sons and daughters they adorn the story of 
humanity. 

These things to their honour. On the other side 
I shall quote some Japanese authorities. Says one of 
their writers : ' In the matter of mutual distrust we 
Japanese know that it exists to such an extent that we 
are hard put to it when having to defend ourselves 
against the charges brought by foreigners.' This chiefly 
in matters of commerce and business — whence the 
foreign trader's grudge against this people, with whom 
* he never knows where he is,' as I have quoted. 

Says a notable Japanese Christian (a clergyman) : 
' The Japanese readily gives up, and says there is no 
help for it ; or, when fighting against some enemy, he 
again very quickly makes peace. To fight to the bitter 
end, even in the cause of righteousness, is not his strong 
characteristic. To take care of himself, and be faithful 
until his time of death comes, nay more, to cherish the 



A FANTASY OF MYSTERY 13 

noble hope of eternal life — this spirit I believe he can 
attain unto only through the influence of Christianity.' 

One of their philosophers of the day writes : 
' Japanese morality consists of an appeal to the feelings. 
Filial piety, loyalty, what are they but sentiments? 
Our education is all centred on the education of the 
emotions. Until we pay more attention to the develop- 
ment of the intellect and the will we shall not be qualified 
to rank with the foremost nations.' 

I have again Pere 's opinion sweetly distilled 

to me in the garden he loved, a garden of suburban 
Tokyo. Let me give it to show how, after twenty 
years of the intimacy of service of this race, they are 
only a mitigated mystery. I cannot, unfortunately, 

report Pere 's benignant eye, nor the sibilant 

cadences of his Flemish accent. 

' The Japanese,' said he, as we walked in his garden, 
' the Japanese seem to me exactly like children. You 
do not expect a moral act from a child, and it is exactly 
so with this people. You may get one who is honest 
and will remain so for a considerable time, but it is im- 
possible to say that he will not break away to-morrow,, 
or to-day, in the manner of a child. 

' As to religion, I think, as you say, that they do 
not have the religious " faculty." The after-life does 
not enter into their view at all. Their Shintoism takes 
no account of an after-life except in the form of trans- 
migration. They have, indeed, their Shinto hero-gods, 
which are like our Catholic saints — men who died long 
ago, but who, as the priests tell them, are in the spirit- 
world protecting them. There is no real idea of the 
continuance of their own lives, nor of God. There is 
no feeling of the supernatural as we think of it, and 
therefore no feeling of a thing called religion. 



14 JAPAN 

' As to the character of the Japanese they are, as I 
say, children. For instance, they have no capacity for 
forethought. The Japanese are, I think, the most 
perfect Christians in the world, for they certainly do as 
the Bible says, they " take no thought for the morrow." 
Indeed, I think they must be more perfect than Christ 
Himself, for in the morning they take no thought for 
the afternoon. They are remarkable for their lack 
of fixity of purpose, especially in their occupations. 
I often tell them about this in my sermons. I say to 
them that if they are potato merchants to-day they 
should stick to that business and not run off to-morrow 
to be railway porters or street cleaners. I tell my con- 
gregations that they must be reasonable beings before 
they can be good Christians. 

* Sometimes I think the future of the country must 
be great, but oftenest I am depressed by many signs 
around me, and so relapse into doubt. The longer I 
am here and the more I see, I think the less enthusiastic 
I am about them. 

* There is an abyss between Europeans and Japanese. 
I believe that that abyss can be bridged by Christianity 
and by Christ alone.' 

Pere tried to amuse me, 1 think. He suc- 
ceeded, but he forgot the governing men of Japan. 

This finally, though it is merely the statement of a 
prize-winner in a Tokyo newspaper symposium on an 
allegation that early development and earl)'^ decay are 
characteristics of the Japanese : ' Japanese have four 
defects : ( i ) They are quick-witted, but weak ; (2) they 
are satisfied with small attainments ; (3) they soon 
weary of things they undertake ; (4) they grow old 
too soon.' 

On the important matters to which these quotations 



A FANTASY OF MYSTERY 15 

are apposite there is probably a passable unanimity even 
among the Japanese themselves. The ruck of the 
people is somewhat shifty ; somewhat easily dashed in 
enterprise ; somewhat superficially emotional ; some- 
what easily ' satisfied with small attainments.' 

Beyond these things, which are not for admiration, 
and beyond those others I have quoted which are 
honourable, there is a great unknown, where even they 
themselves feel that they walk in chaos, a chaos — not 
an anarchy — which is probably forming into Beauty, 
but which the devil's advocates among Japan's critics 
would have you believe is to take the horrid shape 
of Japan's Tarpeian rock with the sea of destruction 
below. 

This unknown holds the embryo of the soul of the 
Japan of the future. This chaos holds in suspension 
the constituents of Japan's national character. There 
has already been a deposit from the New, as there is a 
solid residuum from the Old, but the body of this people's 
national genius, this people's soul, is in the air, in the 
womb, in chaos, in mystery. 

The educated Japanese who knows what you mean 
when you ask for a glimpse of the soul of his country 
and his people tells you that it is Bushido— the code of 
the military gentlemen, the knights, of the Old Japan ; 
our own early-day chivalry with the ladies left out, or 
with the master, the lord of the soil, the baron and his 
authority, displacing the ladies and the church. But 
Bushido does not carry us very far on the way to com- 
prehension and understanding of the Japanese character 
to-day. How could it, when you know that the 
Japanese military class numbered two millions, and that 
the Japanese nation to-day is forty-four or forty-five 
millions strong .'' How could it when you know that 



1 6 JAPAN 

an avalanche of new ideas has been poured in upon the 
land from Europe — Europe, which is six hundred years 
away from a code with a recognisable family resemblance 
to Bushido — Europe, which in those six hundred years 
has taken unto herself innumerable new gods ? 

Japan at present cannot be classified by national 
attributes. There is a meagre list of postulates for the 
majority of the people — that they are artists, patriots, 
practisers of the graces of life ; that they are crafty in 
treaty, but withal 'satisfied with small attainments'; 
emotional. Nobody knows anything more for certain ; 
whether they have imagination, magnanimity, the mind 
for great attempts and great sacrifices ; self-reliance, 
the instinct for the practical based on the ideal, the 
capacity for hardness without cruelty ; the power to 
win without loss, to lose with gain ; endurance, social 
fortitude, private self-respect ; and the score more of 
the constituents of character. This is all a jumble, 
a confusion in which all the virtues and all their oppos- 
ites, all light and all darkness, are visible and invisible. 
So it is that Europeans of forty years' residence in 
Japan know less of its people than the stripling who 
' came out ' last year. They mean that their eyes have 
a wider and keener perception of the chaos ; of the 
unknowable ; that they know better than the novice 
that it is impossible to know. 

The gods of Europe, and the manes and penates of 
the Japan which was not Europe, in their conflict make 
this mystery. 

You find on examination that the country is saved 
from the penalties of this chaos by its governing men. 
Under them are forty-four and a half millions of people 
whose minds are not made up between the old gods and 
the new ; who, in their perplexity, worship under both 



A FANTASY OF MYSTERY 17 

hierarchies, or under none ; who mollify their dryads 
with peace-ofFerings bought with the wages of service 
given to alien deities. The commercial class, for one 
instance, does not yet know whether to succeed with 
Oriental cunning or with the European strong hand and 
straight dealing. But the governing men know what 
they must do. They know that with the nation's affairs 
it must be the European strong hand, as far as the 
country is able, and European straight dealing whether 
the country is able or whether it isn't — this, or nothing. 
Therefore the strong hand and the straight dealing it is ; 
as witness a great navy and a formidable army, and the 
Alliance with England which was born in straight dealing 
and must prosper in it. This keeps the country right 
with the world — its governing men know what has to 
be done. They ride upon the chaos. The world sees 
them ; not the Japanese people. As much as is seen 
of this people is still chiefly a mystery. 



Ill 

THE METROPOLIS OF A REVOLUTION 

One must needs make haste to describe Tokyo, Japan's 
capital — the centre of the Japanese Revolution in Being. 
For before the ink of one's writing is dry the descrip- 
tion may be a reminiscence of the past, an anachronism, 
a memory. Your ' yesterday ' of to-day may be to- 
morrow's ' last century ' as to the streets of Tokyo ; 
as to its architecture, its shops, its very topography, and 
its moats of slimy green water and their gloomy walls, 
Cyclopean built. For one thing, Tokyo suffers from 
fires. In the old days the fires made a new city of it 
every seven years. Nowadays two hundred houses 
are a night's mouthful to their terrible maws. But 
the Municipality tries to get even with the dragon 
and make the future of Tokyo great by pigeon-holing 
the ground plan of a new Tokyo against to-morrow's 
fire. Tokyo's ' congested areas ' are glorified there 
into schemes of ample avenues, which will starve the 
fire dragon, make the city great, and bewilder the 
stranger who knew Tokyo last year. Tokyo, it seems, 
is always in the hands of the scene-shifters. It is a 
dissolving view ; almost a mirage, so fleeting — the 
hoary permanence of our English towns being con- 
sidered — are the images of wood and stucco which 
abide for a day within its ample circuit. The founda- 

i8 



THE METROPOLIS OF A REVOLUTION 19 

tion of the city was three hundred years ago, but were 
it not for its moats and its tombs, one could not assure 
oneself that one beholds Antiquity anywhere in Tokyo. 

Perhaps the best and the most is said when we say 
that Tokyo is typical of Japan. In this city you see 
the transmutation of a nation in progress. It is the 
centre of the whirlpool where all the flotsam and jetsam 
of the Old Japan — that which has no strength or plea 
or relevancy other than its age — is brought together 
and drawn down to oblivion by the centripetal force 
of the New. And the maelstrom as yet has not done 
a tithe of its work ; its power, its momentum, is young. 
Hence perhaps it is that Tokyo is more interesting in 
these days — certainly more curious and ridiculous — 
than it ever was in its past, than ever it may be in its 
future. The city is a lightning-change artist. It is a 
harlequin and a clown ; a sober City man and a hall 
porter ; a guy with an undertaker's pants and the 
scarlet doublet of a Cavalier ; it wears the features of 
a statesman and the hat of an Irish pedlar. And this, 
of course, is necessary. To transform a country in a 
generation is to make it ridiculous. In Tokyo you 
surprise the lightning-change artist when he has doiFed 
his smock for a frock-coat, but before he has been able 
to discard his corduroys and his brogues. Not to be 
laughed at, Tokyo should be closed for alterations and 
repairs for twenty years. She cannot retreat to her 
boudoir, so the lady changes in public, and blushes 
withal. But the world is considerate, and we need 
only laugh in our sleeves. 

The true impressionist picture of Japan's capital 
would convey that any picture — any permanent picture 
— is impossible, that a permanent picture will be im- 
possible for the next twenty years, perhaps for the next 



20 JAPAN 

fifty or one hundred years. If this picture, which can- 
not be a picture, can assume the character of a humorous 
sketch — Hercules or Helen wearing a silk hat, and 
attired in a Japanese dressing-gown made in London — 
as an allegorical representation of present-day Tokyo it 
is complete. 

There is a spot in a tree-lined avenue of Tokyo, 
from which you may see, upon the right, a French- 
American chateau (the official residence of a Minister); 
in front, a foreign Legation, with a Doric colonnade, 
embosomed among the trees of a Japanese garden ; on 
the left, the Japanese Houses of Parliament, an inde- 
scribable huddle of plaster and timber, apparently all 
gables ; and behind, if you turn about, a Japanese 
newspaper office, built to simulate an honest, stone- 
fronted fabric, but bewrayed by blotches like the map of 
Africa on the face which it shows to the Swiss-American 
chateau. All this is within a radius of a few hundred 
yards from your standing-place, and all the time you 
are within the enceinte of a castle moat of the time of 
our James I. 

A London architect, transported per magic carpet 
to the Ginza, Tokyo's Cheapside, should find it every 
whit as good as the play. The excellent folks there 
would entice the stranger to traffic with them in their 
pretty Japanese wares, but they do not know about the 
street itself. They forget its excellent entertainment. 
Less than 50 per cent of it is now Japanese ; none of it 
perhaps is now pure Japanese, for most of the once 
Japanese shops, of fired plaster and tiled roofs, have 
glass fronts, and counters, and doors with iron locks, all 
which are European. That which is not Japanese is 
everything else : which means that it is nothing you 
can classify or name. None of it is tall ; Tokyo's 



THE METROPOLIS OF A REVOLUTION 21 

earthquakes will always kill the Yankee skyscraper here. 
There is one two-storied building in the Ginza. Its 
height attracts your attention from afar ; it stands up so. 
Tokyo, as a whole, is superficial area without height. 
In this Cheapside, the Ginza, there is a white-painted, 
square-built block, with a petty pediment flanked by 
towers carrying cupolas shaped after the Stamboul 
ellipse. This meretricious mongrel, which wears a 
German clock in its front and sells Japanese-European 
gew-gaws within, shoulders a small piece of Whitechapel, 
of old and rain- washed brick. Cheek by jowl with the 
little bit of Whitechapel is a Parisian kiosk, and next 
door to that you have a row of huts, or hutches, or 
lean-to's — what you will — of wood, of plaster, of clay, 
of glass, or of all — even of stone — with less than 
twenty feet of frontage each, and permission to be 
there, in the principal business street of the capital of 
Japan, because the Government of the land was con- 
verted to Europeanism a generation ago. But the 
width of the street foretells its future, and speaks of 
the dreams its rulers dream who were brought up to 
alleys, if not in them. 

And, indeed, the Tokyo of the future — or its genius 
— is already represented in stone and lime ; not in this 
Ginza, the great business street, but, for the contrast's 
sake, no doubt, in the midst of what to the stranger 
seems a maze of mediaeval moats, whose walls are now 
green and grey with moss and lichen. In the old days 
the demesne of the Shoguns, the acting emperors of Japan 
for seven hundred years with intervals, was occupied, 
within the enceinte of the outmost of three moats, by 
the residences of the tributary princes — the Daimyos. 
Nowadays they are building Government offices, 
Ministers' official residences, bureaus, and such, where 



22 JAPAN 

stood the halls of the lords of a lost day. These are 
the new Tokyo, the Tokyo of the future, the Tokyo 
into which the present harlequin city is being trans- 
figured or transmuted — not without much contriving, 
for there is little money available in Japanese coffers 
even to put a respectable roof over the heads of 
Japanese legislators. The new Tokyo is there, how- 
ever — begun, well started ; as witness the Naval 
Department, the Judicial Department, and the Courts 
of Justice — three great piles in a row, which, after the 
rest of Tokyo, demand that you shall call them fine, 
and proud and noble, albeit they are in the curious 
Moorish- American style. They may have Turkish 
minarets capping a porch you might find at the 
door of a Fifth Avenue mansion, and no doubt brick 
and dressed granite do not typify the ideal in archi- 
tectural colour schemes, but they are in proportion 
as to height, depth, and length ; the granite is granite 
(it is so often lath and plaster in Japan) ; and the 
columns of the facade are what they are meant to be, 
Doric or Ionic or Corinthian ; and there is space and 
to spare, if you want to admire from afar. This is the 
Tokyo of the future ; this is London near Whitehall, 
with ampler streets ; it is Paris — a little of it — where 
its boulevards are. 

You have Japan's history figured in three stages in 
Tokyo — the past, the present, and the future. The 
present is the Ginza, inchoate, incongruous, everything 
at once, built for to-day ; the future, its Courts of 
Justice — Europe definitely realised (somewhat after 
Japanese fashion) in stone and lime. The past is 
Tokyo's moats. They are a maze until you know 
them. In the night, with the full moon sliced into 
quarters~on their wind-driven waters, the Feudal Age 



THE METROPOLIS OF A REVOLUTION 23 

stands before you like an Apparition. The arms of 
aged firs dip from the crest of the ramparts ; the walls, 
twenty feet high, are a scowl in age-begrimed stone, 
the waters are green and thirty yards wide. It wants 
but the glint of the casques of mail-clad warriors on the 
walls to give the Apparition life. Even without it one 
dreams, and dreams, and dreams until one smiles at the 
juxtaposition, which you may easily find, of a modern 
newspaper office, streaming with electric light and 
humming with machine-made noise, and a feudal 
moat in its pristine — glory, can we, or shall we say, 
since Japan has sought and found new glories ? 

The enclosure — the enceinte — of the outermost of 
the system of moats which the Shoguns dug for the 
Emperors to fill must be near nine square miles. Chiefly 
there the new Tokyo is being born, but the moats and 
their walls must remain from day to day for years to 
come. The work of the Feudal Age may not be undone 
in an hour. So happens — so will amuse the stranger in 
Tokyo for another generation — this pleasant, amusing 
jumble — Swiss chateaux and European- American law 
courts, surrounded by moats of the era 900 to 

1400 A.D. 

Away from the generous moat-encircled piazzas, in 
which stately Government buildings have already risen, 
' projecting ' the future, and away from the city's 
Cheapside, which wears architectural motley and the 
cap and bells, Tokyo is merely a wilderness of shanties. 
There are suburbs, certainly, where Japanese princes 
and lords have built themselves pleasure-houses within 
queens' gardens. But let your eye sweep the horizon 
from the viewing-tower at Asakusa, Tokyo's Battersea 
Park, and you behold a level sea of low, blue-black 
roofs, with islands and strakes of green trees. On this 



24 JAPAN 

sea a great giant might walk without stepping high or 
turning aside anywhere save at his coming against the 
Government buildings and the heavy hoods of the 
temples. 

Architecturally Tokyo is only a promise, as we 
Westerns would look upon it. Where it is not a 
promise, it is, as in its Cheapside, an entertainment. 
Under the walls of its moats it is a romance, something 
of a dream. Where it is neither a promise, nor an 
entertainment, nor a romance, it is a Japanese White- 
chapel, inhabited, however, by people who live and 
speak in cleanliness and keep their children happy. 



IV 

TOKYO'S AUTOMATIC TELEPHONES 

* Mi friend, who hass come back from England, hass 
told me that Bank of England does not use telephone. 
Iss that so ? ' 

When you say, with some conscious economy of the 
truth, that it may be so, your young Japanese friend 
thinks that ' England must be ver' conservatif country.' 
Then he laughs, not very moderately. It is never 
possible to satisfy oneself as to the precise meaning of 
the Japanese gentleman's laugh. It is possible some- 
times to say that it may mean one of three or four 
things : there one rests. But if he intend his laugh to 
be * on ' the Bank of England, or even England itself, 
one must reflect, being in Tokyo, that the imposition 
is no liberty. Tokyo seems to have said to itself: 
' It's true I can't be London or New York yet awhile, 
but I'm hanged if I can't go one better than either of 
the two in telephones.' And it has gone one better ; 
in fact it has gone a hundred and one. It isn't the 
poles and the wires that tell you of this ambition of 
Tokyo, Japan's capital. The poles and the wires are 
there, but they are not graphic enough. They make a 
cage of some thick-set streets in the city, but they don't 
advertise volubly. So, if you turn down the next alley 
to see * real ' Japanese city life, without the modern 

25 



26 JAPAN 

stress, ancient, simple, industrious, unequivocal, or the 
other thing, belike the first note of the * real thing ' you 
find is a finger-post, with white letters in English which 
say, ' Public Automatic Telephone.' This being some- 
thing other than your seeking, you sheer oif to the 
left, with open eye, appealing for the * real thing/ 
Peradventure you do find some shadowings of the Old 
Japan — this, even yet, being possible in Tokyo — but 
Nemesis awaits you in a hundred yards. You will pay 
toll at the next turning for your incursion into the Old 
Japan, for there, aloft, blatant in its legibility, limpid in 
literary purity, impeccable in its spelling, you have the 
legend, ' Public Automatic Telephone.'' Take a jinrikisha 
— wherein you will feel a child again, because the 
rikisha is a magnified perambulator, and the memory 
of an early sensation never quite fades — take a jinrikisha 
and fiercely bid the puller pull you thence — there, any- 
where, away, away from the Public Automatic Tele- 
phones. If the Tokyo jinrikisha-puUer understood you 
he would say that you were mad, for you ask the im- 
possible. But let him hie you to a green-hedged suburb ; 
sweet, rich, scented ; shadowed by the noble cryptomeria, 
full, as it were, of placidity ; the aroma of a leisurely 
simplicity environing all the little match-box dwellings. 
On the lintel of the rabbit-hutch police-box ahead of 
you, where the policemen sit as lost in an ecstasy of 
noon -day gossip, there they have anticipated your 
coming — Public Automatic Telephone. 

You are not to suppose that this is an exaggeration 
of Tokyo's telephones. Doubtless only a very earnest 
searcher after the ' true romance ' in Japan would be 
alarmed by them so as to seek vain sanctuary from 
them in the suburbs of the city. It doesn't hurt 
much after all to be greeted at every street-crossing 



TOKYO'S AUTOMATIC TELEPHONES 27 

in Tokyo by a Public Automatic Telephone even if 
you come to be enchanted by the virgin fragrance of 
unpolluted Japanese manners and customs. The fact 
is there nevertheless. You cannot get away from the 
Public Automatic Telephone in Tokyo, all in capital 
letters, white on a black ground, jostling the corre- 
sponding Japanese characters on the narrow finger- 
post. It is the King Charles's head of the city. 
Some autumn evenings, when the west is beaten gold, 
one sees from high places in Tokyo, the holiest, the 
incomparable among mountains, Fujiyama, eighty miles 
away. One has the Public Automatic Telephones always. 
Oftenest Fujiyama summons the vapours to veil her 
everlasting crown, lest men should begin to think her 
common. There is no eclipse, no abatement, no sur- 
cease of the Public Automatic Telephone in Tokyo's 
streets. It is distinctly a ' note ' of the modern city. 

It is one of the congruous incongruities of Japan — 
of the Revolution — congruous because Public Auto- 
matic Telephones are proper in their place, incongruous 
because it may be said for a generalisation that nobody 
uses them in Tokyo ; also, because, when it rains — 
even when it is merely damp — Tokyo's principal 
business street is a quagmire, and because the next 
* note ' of the Europeanisation of Tokyo — next after 
the Public Automatic Telephone — is the German Beer 
Hall. Not German either, for the sign-board is always 
in English, two- foot letters — ' Kyobashi Beer Hall,' 
'Kanda Beer Hall,' 'Fujikawa Beer Hall,' — all along 
a sign-board, thirty feet long, high in the air, opposing 
an unabashed front to the blue empyrean. 

Tokyo, architecturally, wears the motley, because it 
seeks to grow from a chrysalis Japanese city of the 
middle ages to a Paris of the twentieth century in a 



28 JAPAN 

generation or two. It defies the laws of Time and 
Evolution ; whereat, not to be outdone, Time and 
Evolution array Tokyo in garments pour rire^ for 
strangers to laugh at. So, in other traits of its 
corporate existence — its civic economy, so to speak — 
Tokyo seems to be the butt and the taunt of some 
great Law, dominant and masterful, which, being 
defied, is indignant and wreaks a subtle vengeance. 
Tokyo is certainly at war with Convention — with the 
law of the Fitness of Things, which is never satiated 
with homage. Therefore you find a city peppered 
with Automatic Telephone Boxes and German Beer 
Halls which yet endures with Oriental serenity a 
Strand, a Piccadilly, an Edgware Road, and more, 
which in the windy drought are Saharas and in April 
rains Serbonian bogs ; a city which is happy with foot- 
pavements — where there is a pretence of such — which 
are maps of a hilly country with the mountain ranges 
in high relief, the while it plans an ambitious scheme of 
electric tramways ; a city which in some of its public 
places exhibits arc-lamps of 10,000 candle-power and 
in others precipitates you into hospital over a heap 
of shingle wanting a night-light. Its contrasts and 
inconsistencies are delightful until they are injurious. 

Something of it comes from the Japanese penchant 
for fads and ' crazes,' which itself is an eddy of the 
Revolution, something also from what is nearly the 
same thing, a penchant for curiosities and ' new 
things,' the latter perhaps inevitable, since Japan's 
people have been living for half a century in an 
atmosphere vibrating with news of the new, which is 
not Japanese. You are told on indubitable authority 
that the telephone titillates the fancy of this people 
from their finding in it a most excellent and curious 



TOKYO'S AUTOMATIC TELEPHONES 29 

play-thing. So it became, as we say, a ' craze,* and 
now the Government, in its poverty of ready money, 
is two and three years behind in scoring off the list 
of applications for telephone ' installations.' The 
Beer Hall, again, reared its vulgar front all over 
Tokyo the night after a keen brewery company opened 
one for the exclusive sale of its own liquors. There 
is the imitation which is fashion and the imitation 
which is commercial competition. The one has given 
Tokyo its Public Automatic Telephones ; the other 
its Beer Halls. Unfortunately nobody sets a fashion, 
or starts a commercial competition, in smooth foot- 
pavements or macadamised roads. Some day some- 
body may set a fashion of house -building on the 
model of an extended umbrella, and it may become 
a craze in Tokyo. One never knows. 

But it would be wrong to say that Tokyo does 
not know how to be beautiful, simple, charming. Its 
European tram-cars, you may note, have been wallowing 
in the mud of the streets they traverse, and the car-horses, 
as Mark Twain would say, each swallowed a barrel last 
night, but there is enchantment when and where Tokyo 
is Japanese, without Western adulteration. 

Can you doubt that these people have grasped 
something, or seen something, of the Beautiful and the 
Infinite, when you enter the noonday twilight of their 
pine and cedar groves at Ueno and at Shiba ; the former 
Tokyo's Regent's Park if you like, the latter the place 
of Tokyo's tombs — the tombs of the Shoguns, among 
them two men, whose place of sepulture is not here, 
however, to whom Cassar on an encounter in the realm 
of shades might bow without loss of dignity .? Or may 
one affirm that this people has not tasted the mystic 
fruit of the marriage of Art and Nature when one 



30 JAPAN 

walks in the midst of their incalculable, sweet-smelling 
multitudes gone forth with Springtime sunsets to ' view' 
two miles of cherry-blossom on the banks of the Sumida, 
Tokyo's Thames — blossoms which, because of their 
size and richness, and because the green leaves are still 
in bud, make of each tree one vast flower-unit, a single 
Gargantuan bloom, rose-pink and white ? 

There and then Tokyo is beautiful ; or when in 
August, at Asakusa, which will pass for Tokyo's 
Battersea Park, the lotus — a white-clothed being from 
the under-world — opens its wide benignant eye from 
the midst of its bed of basin leaves, whose stalks are 
nosed by great carp, golden and black, themselves 
emancipated from the business of foraging a living by 
the steady donations of puff-cake from visitors to the 
Tea-house on the lip of the pond. 

There one sees Tokyo beautiful, graceful, sweet, 
soothing to the unrestful spirit ; calm, contented, con- 
templative, as the Buddhas in stone which forgather 
there. How remote this — in time and place — from 
Public Automatic Telephones and Beer Halls ! The 
mere contiguity of idea seems an outrage, something 
of a desecration, yet Tokyo — the Revolution — become 
bourgeois unto foolishness in its desire of modernity, 
plants a public Automatic Telephone box by the side of 
the Tea-house on the pond's margin ! 

Tokyo, it is evident, must be a bad place for poets 
for generations to come. But, after all, there is the 
whole of Japan besides, and poets, though they have 
often loved cities, and the * sweet security of streets,' 
seldom write of them. 

It is the student of Evolution who should hasten to 
Tokyo. He will find what surely no Evolutionist has 
dreamt before — that Evolution has its humorous side. 



V 

MANNERS AND THE REVOLUTION 

First dress ; then manners and customs ; thirdly 
ideas. Tokyo suggests the question whether this be 
the order of the Revolution in progress in Japan : 
whether these be the degrees of the process of a 
National Regeneration. There is architectural magni- 
ficence — a little of it — in Tokyo, adopted, imported 
from Europe ; and one notes in the streets of the city, 
in the tram-cars, in the railway carriages, that perhaps 
one in ten of the people wears European dress. At 
a pretentious garden-party in Tokyo the Japanese in 
frock-coat and silk ' topper ' may number nine in ten. 
In the Government offices, in the big banks, the schools, 
the important counting-houses, in most public employ- 
ments, European dress is anything from de rigueur to 
the principal's preference. It is still sometimes the 
principal's indifference, never his repugnance. All this 
is early open to one's eyes in Tokyo. The dress reform 
is distinctly a ' first impression.' So, upon reflection, 
one concludes that social revolutions begin with ex- 
ternals : trousers first, Christianity afterwards ; between 
them the Revolution will sandwich a ball to take the 
place of the Cha ceremonies.^ 

^ Tremendous tea-drinking rituals, which in the Old Japan were the entertainment 
of the exquisite, as they still are, on occasion, their theatrical amusement. 

31 



32 JAPAN 

Perhaps every tenth man in Tokyo streets wears 
European dress. In externals, then, Japan is apparently 
revolutionised to the extent of one-tenth. If the pro- 
cess of the revolution, its degrees, be accomplished 
according to some law of arithmetical progression, we 
may expect to find the revolution of manners and 
customs accomplished to the extent of one-twentieth ; 
of ideas one-fortieth ; and if there be anything deeper, 
more subtle, more peculiarly native and original than 
ideas, — as soul, spirit, dreams, — that element, we shall 
conjecture, is revolutionised in the degree of a meagre 
microscopic eightieth. This is a working theory which 
it is worth while taking into the streets of Tokyo with 
one's guide-book, for, to measure the progress of the 
revolution of manners and customs is necessarily less 
easy than the calculation that one in ten of the men in 
the streets of the Japanese capital wears European dress. 

Data are available. You may note, for instance, in 
course of a week's perambulation of the city that once, 
perhaps twice, the former fashion in men's hair has 
appeared before your eyes — most probably in a swift 
vision of bulky, blocky figures with rubicund faces, 
whirling, in jinrikisha, round some remote sunlit corner 
in the maze of streets. This former fashion is the 
top-knot style of the dead feudal age ; there are some 
stubborn old men, lovers, perhaps reverers, of the 
manners of the old era, if not of the old era itself, 
who, it seems, would dam the invading tide of European 
manners with a levee of hair. They are perhaps one per 
ten thousand, except the glorious company of Japanese 
wrestlers, whose strength, if not in their hair, is mayhap 
in their manner of wearing it, which is the anachronistic 
top-knot. It is now seen, as you may find, scarcely 
once in a blue moon in Japanese streets. The male 



MANNERS AND THE REVOLUTION 33 

population has its hair regularly shorn by regularly 
established hairdressers, most of whom, however, shave 
without lather and use the first finger of their left hand 
for shaving paper. 

A shopkeeper meeting his friend, or his friend's 
sister, or his brother's mother-in-law in the Ginza, 
Tokyo, will present you an opportunity of noting the 
manner of greeting current in the midst of the Revolu- 
tion. The two men, or the lady and the gentleman, 
will show their fine teeth in a broad smile while they 
are still a yard or two apart. They will bow — a deep, 
abasing curtsey, bringing their hands to their knee-caps. 
They will exchange a mouthful of mutual honorifics ; 
then another mutual obeisance. They will then 
emphasise, with deprecatory expletives, their common 
unworthiness at the last meeting, and will again exchange 
a low, long, lingering salute. You will count the salutes, 
— one, two, three ; then perhaps some conversation, with 
numbers four and five for punctuation ; and finally 
numbers six, seven, and eight before the parting. There 
is no shaking of hands. For kissing — perish the im- 
moral thought ! — the Japanese reflects that, at any rate, 
his own fashions in immorality are infinitely to be 
preferred. The national fashion in greetings remains 
unchanged, it seems ; but your English - speaking 
Japanese gentleman, though his embrace of the wife 
of his bosom is a little pat on the back, and though in 
the street he conducts a conversation with his Japanese 
friend in bows, will to you, his European friend, raise 
his hat with Parisian grace and simplicity, and will pass 
on. In its relations with itself, however, the nation 
as yet refuses to budge from its old, graceful, sweet- 
savoured, laborious fashion of greeting — even in the 
streets of Tokyo where a mad youth on a madder cycle 

D 



34 JAPAN 

may interrupt friends to the extent of personal injury 
in the very crisis of one of their greetings. This very 
matter of cycles is of the realm of manners and customs. 
It is on record that the last of the Shoguns — oh, infinite 
pathos ! — rides an American model in these his last 
feeble days — days whose sole light is, so to speak, a 
spirit-lamp of glorious memories — the memories of an 
inheritor of such dominion as Caesar wielded, the sadly 
glorious memories of an inheritor who has lost his 
inheritance.^ And if the last of the Shoguns, who in 
his time has ridden in panoplied palanquins with a 
glittering train — if he is to be found on a 1 903 pattern 
cycle, what may be expected of the Japanese youth ? 
One finds in the streets of Tokyo what may be expected. 
One finds rather more than might be expected. One 
finds the youth make a circus of the public street. The 
Japanese youth has not only adopted the cycle. He has 
fully qualified as a trick rider, and he performs palpably, 
publicly, on the streets of Tokyo — the wider streets, at 
any rate — for nothing. Incidentally you may hear from 
European friends, and many sensible Japanese, that the 
youth's performance is dear at the price. His specialty 
is riding on the hind wheel, like a horse that jibs. Our 
present interest in him is that he signifies the revolution 
of manners. The cycle is more than a manner in Japan. 
It is now an institution, upheld, perpetuated, by race 
meetings, championships of Eastern and Western and 
Southern Japan, tables of records and enormous crowds 
at the race meetings, which are held on Sundays. 

These things — the cycle race meetings and their 
crowds — come to one's knowledge soon after one 

^ There is ample material for an epic of the Shoguns of Japan, or a high-sounding 
tragedy. They were the dynasty of de facto sovereigns which was overthrown 
thirty years ago by the supporters of the dynasty of the Mikados, the de jure 
ruleri. 



MANNERS AND THE REVOLUTION 2S 

begins residence in Japan. Strictly speaking, they are 
not to be seen during one's first strolls in the streets of 
Tokyo, where, however, it is one's privilege to see 
many competitors training for the coming races. Had 
you been in Tokyo this morning you might even have 
seen Japanese ladies cycling — I mean that this is 
a manner or custom which is just beginning : born 
to-day, so to speak. It has to meet embattled armies 
of prejudices, but its triumph is probable. There is, 
too, an automobile depot in Tokyo. Its success is less 
probable. There is a stronger force than Japanese 
prejudice in opposition to the motor car — Japanese 
poverty, relative poverty at any rate. 

Haulage on the streets of Tokyo, you find, is still 
largely human, and therefore unchanged from Adam's 
time. Humanity draws forty or fifty thousand rikishas 
in Tokyo daily, and the rikisha is the landau, victoria, 
phaeton, cabriolet, and char-a-banc of Japan. It is 
sometimes also the dray and the grocer's delivery van, 
and the European lady makes a baby-carriage of it. 
The real dray — commonly a sort of floor, twelve or 
fifteen feet long, by four or five wide, balanced on a single 
axle-tree — often has a boy for a horse, or a poor old 
woman and a boy, or an entire family, — husband, wife, 
and children. The haulage is human, anyhow, and, on 
going farther afield, far into the Japan which is unlike 
Tokyo in being wholly beautiful, possibly because it is 
untouched by the National Regeneration — there one 
finds the haulage just as human and horse haulage just 
as occasional and as decrepit as it is in Tokyo, the 
capital city. It may be that human haulage is an 
imperative necessity in Japan, not a fashion ; and 
imperative necessities, it may be, are hard to revolu- 
tionise. Still, there are already electric tramways in the 



36 JAPAN 

country and a breed of pony -horses, thick in the 
barrel and broad in the flank, when they are fairly well 
fed. One hears it said, though, that that large part of 
the Japanese nation which is daily yoked to carriages 
of one kind or another, is a splendid army reserve. 
The rikisha-pullers exhibit, indeed, a splendid quadri- 
ceps development, and they do twenty, thirty, even 
fifty miles a day on a diet of rice. My present concern 
is with the fact, clearly apparent in the streets of 
Tokyo, that the revolution of manners and customs 
has not displaced human haulage ; that here is signified 
one frontier, one limit, of the Revolution. 

I drop into an eating-house in Tokyo, and find, 
however, that the rikisha-puller and the Japanese dray- 
horse have learned to eat meat — even to have it cooked 
to a European nicety, and I reflect that there is 
significance as of revolution here, for the eating of meat 
touches a matter of origins. The killing of animals 
was irreligious, perhaps sacrilegious, not so long since 
in Japan. Nowadays there are butchers' shops in 
Tokyo, and eating-houses that make a specialty of 
their grilled steaks. The Japanese conscript from the 
dreamiest Arcadia of the land, where life is a round of 
rice and a task of garnering it, goes into barracks to 
tackle a meat diet by order of the Czars of the land, 
from whom there is no appeal. So the nation, from 
being a race of rice-eaters, is changing to a nation 
of beef-eaters, and their Buddhistic Shintoism, which 
forbids the taking away of life, is discredited. The 
Japanese become beef- eaters and Agnostics simulta- 
neously. Their bellies turning to flesh, their minds 
turn to the devil. Nevertheless, even in the Ginza, 
the Cheapside of Tokyo, one encounters the religious 
enthusiast, the character of the age of palmers. It 



MANNERS AND THE REVOLUTION 37 

may be man, or woman, or boy. It usually wears 
a huge circular hat of stout, coarse rush-straw, two 
and a half or three feet across, a wretched hobblede- 
hoyish suiting of clouts, once blue calico, gathered up 
at the waist ; a wrapping of more clouts round the legs 
from the feet upwards, like a soldier's puttees after a 
hard campaign, and sandals of straw. This enthusiast, 
whose hat seems built to exclude thought and imagining 
of the vain world, carries a stout palmer's staff and a 
capacious pouch slung from his girdle. The pouch 
will receive rice -alms, payment for blessings and 
prayers delivered. This dirty apparition of the crusading 
era tinkles a shrill little bell with a muttered accom- 
paniment of prayer and praise anywhere in Tokyo, 
within hail, it may be, of the House of the Japanese 
Parliament. It wanders incredible leagues over Japan, 
expiating sins, propitiating gods, making merit for 
post-mortem promotion a degree onwards in the in- 
credible progress to Nirvana. When will the Revolu- 
tion reach it ? Who knows } Yet, sooth to say, this 
apparition is scarcely of the manners and customs of 
the country. Properly, it is of that element which, 
upon the basis of the working theory of the Revolution, 
is as yet but moved a meagre eightieth degree from its 
ancient centre. Catch one such palmer, entice him to 
cross-examination and candid confession, and a window 
will be opened to you, giving upon a whole world of 
weird Oriental demonology, fantastic mythology, mon- 
strous theology — opened to you, if you possess the 
key, with the white glare from an electric motor shop 
in the Ginza to illumine its shapes and freaks. Does 
one, then, through this window peer into the soul of 
Japan ? Be these grinning elves and distorted goblins 
the true gods of Japanese devotion ? Some say so, 



38 JAPAN 

but over the way there is an eating-house, alive with 
electric light, and agog with the talk of a bunch of 
paid members of Parliament who contemplate a ' cave * 
in the coming session. They are working their way 
through a menu of soup, meat, dessert, and the tools 
of their labour are not chop-sticks. 

Tokyo's streets, you perceive, are a panorama of 
the Japanese revolution of manners, and a vision of 
the Soul of the Japanese Past — not all the panorama, 
nor all the vision, for there are the public parks, 
and the homes of Tokyo, to say nothing of the deep 
heart of the country and the deeper heart of the people. 



VI 

A JAPANESE QUESTION? 

One passes from the streets of Tokyo into the parks or 
pleasure-grounds of the city, and thence into a home or 
homes of the people — one does this, and doing it makes 
a sort of progress or advance in the Mysteries. It is, 
so to speak, an initiation, with a gradation of mysteries, 
from the simple, the obvious, the unperplexing, towards 
some such fateful riddle as this : May a Nation, may a 
Race, forget its Origins ? It is easy to read the signs 
in the streets of Tokyo. There is hardly a Japanese 
Question there. The dread interrogations which Asia 
sometimes put to Europe never even whisper them- 
selves in the Ginza of Tokyo. One is merely amused 
there — amused by the attempted English of the shop 
signs, and irritated by the uneven kerb, or by the 
sizzling, viscous compost of the street crossings, if 
rain shall have lately fallen. One's mental attitude in 
the streets of Tokyo — upon introduction to them at 
any rate — is made up of good-humour, invited by a 
people who can be so unconsciously entertaining, of 
sympathy with a people so evidently struggling towards 
the light, of the generous commendation which the 
serio-comic success of their attempts so properly invites 
from their accompHshed exemplars. We do not 
suspect, we do not yet even dream, that there may be 

39 



40 JAPAN 

a Japanese Question. We should laugh to be asked to 
think of a Japanese Sphinx who should call a halt to us 
with riddles of life and death. One's ear takes the first 
vague echoes of a Question away from Tokyo's streets 
— in the parks, the pleasure-grounds, especially Asakusa, 
the Battersea Park of the city, with its perpetual fair 
playing chorus to its eternal tragi-comedy in wood — its 
temple. Asakusa is not a park. It is a temple, and its 
grounds — but one might say that it is the playground of 
the people of Tokyo where they worship, or the temple 
of the people where they play. At any rate it is here — 
in the midst of the crowds of its fair, on the steps of its 
prodigious temple of the Goddess of Mercy, Kwannon 
of innumerable hands, betokening her infinite capacity 
of giving — it is here that one advances a stage towards 
the heart of the Japanese mystery, which one never 
reaches. It is here that one begins to perceive that 
there is, or that at least there may be, a Question, a 
Mystery. In the streets you are amused. Here you 
begin to think, to reflect, perhaps to suspect. One 
now finds that an attitude of good-humour, of con- 
descending sympathy, of superior commendation, is not 
all that the case requires. There is more here than 
meets the eye on the streets of Tokyo. Some whisper 
wanders here of the dread interrogations of Asia unto 
Europe — the everlasting East to the West which passes. 
Chiefly perhaps it is the crowds of Asakusa, Tokyo's 
Battersea Park, which send Rumour afoot with a deep 
question for the curious stranger — the crowds and their 
playthings in the temple grounds ; the crowds and 
their worships on the temple stairs, in the temple hall. 
To be in the midst of any Japanese crowd, even in 
these days of Revolution ; to be a stranger from the 
ultimate West in the belly of a crowd of this ultimate 



A JAPANESE QUESTION? 41 

East ; to be alone there ; to be singular, to be con- 
spicuous, to be marked, — if only because one has six 
inches or five more of stature than the crowd — this, of 
itself, is to feel, even if one has only a little imagination, 
that the European attitude of amused interest, benignant 
commendation, fatherly encouragement, is not all that 
the case of Japan requires ; that it is far from sufficient ; 
so far, that sometimes, as one recalls it, it seems apropos 
of nothing, or next to nothing. Here a big * Perhaps ' 
insists on its importance in relation to the Revolution. 

The Japanese crowd is no less an entity than the 
English, or the French. It is no less but rather more 
an entity of character, of complexity — of original 
emotions, original passions. Are we strangers to the 
French, or the French to us } Is a French crowd an 
amusement, an exasperation, to the Englishman ; an 
English crowd a foolishness, a terror to the Frenchman.? 
A Japanese crowd must be as much and more to both, 
inasmuch as we are of the Western fringe of Europe 
and they of the Eastern fringe of Asia. One finds ^ow 
expressly ' friendly ' signs abroad in any Japanese 
crowd. Individually, separately, its members may have 
taken a tincture of Europeanism ; as a crowd they are 
wholly Japanese. It is rather unusual to see a Japanese 
in European dress in a popular gathering in Japan — 
assembled, that is, on a purely popular, purely Japanese 
occasion, such as Asakusa in Tokyo always presents. 
A Japanese may deem it desirable to go to business in 
our morning suit ; he takes the evening air and his 
recreation in the habit of his forefathers. Conspicuous, 
apart, isolated, the stranger in a Japanese crowd takes it 
as a friendly sign to see a Japanese in a European 
suiting, however ill-cut, and even this sign he may not 
get. The Japanese crowd, as a rule, has the smile of 



42 JAPAN 

curiosity, of amusement, for the stranger. One scarcely 
sees the smile of open friendliness. One may on occa- 
sion detect the sneer of contempt and the supercilious 
gaze of assumed superiority ; there is sometimes the 
oblivious eye of high disdain, the Asiatic eye that 
beholds incomparable visions and contemplates the 
abstractions which are, in Asia, the true, the pregnant, 
the adorable realities. Having capacity for translation 
— either literal or of the language of signs — one hears 
— this chiefly from irresponsible youth, no doubt — the 
jest, the jeer, the ' caustic comment ' that is nearly 
insult. Our red hair and green eyes are the standing 
joke of the Japanese larrikin ; they are sometimes, 
doubtless, a secret offence to the best of our Japanese 
friends. Certainly let it be said that the Japanese 
crowd to the stranger is never, save upon cause given, 
openly injurious, rarely of set purpose unmannerly. 
Yet let it also be said that the stranger, the susceptible 
stranger, often feels that the decorum of the multitude 
is, as it were, by official order, that it is the acceptance 
of an officially -prescribed line of conduct by a docile 
folk. There are hints in their faces, in their deport- 
ment, of deeps beyond or below the docile acceptance 
of the official regulation and the universal conformity 
thereunto. 

To be sure, I have said nothing of the sweetness of 
the Japanese holiday crowd ; of the exquisite attire of 
its womenfolk ; of the puppet- picturesqueness of its 
children, whose apparel is the stolen texture of many 
rainbows ; of the loud, enormous ' scuff,' if it be a 
moving crowd, of its wooden clogs upon the ground ; 
of its friendliness towards itself ; of its innate cheerful- 
ness if left to itself. 

But the crowd at Asakusa, in Tokyo, is more than 



A JAPANESE QUESTION? 43 

a crowd, for part, if not the whole of it, comes to wor- 
ship, or more properly, to register its devotions — to 
pray, as well as to play. It is, therefore, by way of 
being a Japanese religious assembly as well as a Japanese 
picnic ; a bean-feast, with intervals for converse with 
the gods. Wherefore it happens that the Asakusa 
crowd is more potent to conjure a questioning in the 
mind of the alien beholder than any other in Tokyo — 
any other in all Japan. For here, around the steps of 
this temple of the Goddess of Mercy, in the centre of 
Tokyo, the centre of the country, here, as it seems. 
Revolution and Reaction should join in closest conflict. 
The spirit, the idea of the Revolution is elsewhere 
doubtless ; the general and staff of its forces are posted 
elsewhere. This is the firing line : one sees here how 
the battle goes ; how the present and the former things 
' have at it ' in mortal conflict. Kwannon, Goddess of 
Mercy, beholds the strangest of wars surging at her 
feet — the war of the Twentieth Century with the 
Middle Ages ; the war of Science with the Mediaeval 
Popular Idea ; of Revolution with passive, inert 
Reaction. 

One moves through the crowd of the fair — the 
crowd which plays — to the crowd of the temple — the 
crowd which prays. Blithely they mount the long 
flight of steps shadowed by the deep, dolorous temple- 
eaves — men, women, children ; ten in shoddy, thread- 
bare calico, of indigo-blue, blear brown, greasy black, 
to one or two in silk of grey, dove-colour, fawn, mauve ; 
the children all pinks and vermilions and sky-blues, 
with a dollar -piece shaven of their crowns. One 
mounts the temple steps with the crowd, brushing 
another which, having prayed, now goes to play. One 
gains the top — the hall of the temple of Kwannon, 



44 JAPAN 

Goddess of Mercy, and one faces the altar -shrine, 
barred from the human crowd by a great lattice of wire. 
It blinks with shivering candle flames and the yellow 
gleam of many gilded gods. It is dark withal ; tall, 
formidable, gloomy ; threatening, yet serene ; com- 
manding, yet terribly indifferent ; an embodied con- 
science, yet an incarnate peace. One reflects that this 
might be somewhat of a power, skilfully used ; a fortress 
of Reaction, a sceptre wielding strong, stern dominion ; 
a prodigious ally of the ministers of the former things, 
if so be they use it with knowledge, or even with cun- 
ning. The bent, paunchy priest, a servant of the 
shrine, who limps to the aid of a dying candle on the 
altar — does he know what power resides with him in 
these unique Japanese times — the times of a conflict of 
the ideals of East and West ; of Europe and Asia ; of a 
collision of two civilisations ; he, the priest of the civil- 
isation in possession ^ Is there a clue to the future of 
his power in the thing he does after vivifying the dying 
candle on the shrine ^ He limps to a booth to take his 
turn with a brother in telling the fortunes of devotees 
of the temple at a copper a time. Is this to use the 
power of the shrine with knowledge ? Who knows ? 

The people who pray at Asakusa are an everflow- 
ing stream. The deeps of the temple roof receive 
the echoes of the constant clatter of the procession 
of their clogs on the dirty, dusty floor. The stream 
of them is itself a mystery — an interrogation ; but 
their prayer is the poignant surprise. To see how 
this people, who amuse us in their streets, pray in their 
temples — these temples of the old era, the era which 
knew not Europe and Western gods — to see and to 
hear them pray before this formidable, gloomy power, 
is to be haled, even against one's will, to the threshold 



A JAPANESE QUESTION? 45 

of the truth about Japan — the truth that it is impossible 
to know anything accurately, fully ; the truth that it is 
necessary to assume the inexplicable, inexplicable Asia, 
even in the Modern Japan. Bowed, or on their knees, 
their heads go down ; they clap their palms thrice, or 
rub them slowly together with a hollow hiss — this that 
the god's ear may know of their presence — and an 
ecstatic petition for the provision of this good, or the 
prevention of that ill, flows from quick, living lips : the 
whole act preceded by the proffer of a price for the boon 
— the flinging of a copper, as it were, into the lap of 
their living god, — a monstrous chest, as big as a bed, at 
the feet of the shrine. All prayer is here, — the passionate 
prayer ; the prayer that is an argument with its god ; 
the prayer that is an accusation ; the prayer that is 
cowardice ; the prayer of cupidity ; the prayer of 
unnatural hate. Criminals pray to their god to abet 
their crimes ; widows to turn the hearts of their sons 
from evil ; merchants to prosper their coming specula- 
tion in rice ; lovers to seal the vows of the late tryst ; 
men to blast their enemies. The tones of a mortal agony 
rise from lips that neighbour a mouth whimpering 
for a cent per cent profit on to-morrow's deal in pre- 
served fish. And the gloomy, formidable shrine hears 
all, serene, impassive. Its candle flames shiver, and its 
gilded gods gleam. There is no other sign. 

This spectacle, one thinks, is scarcely amusing. It 
is more than merely curious, grotesque, extraordinary. 
There is a power here — the heart of a nation and its 
god, known or unknown. It is not enough merely to 
smile or to marvel. The spectacle asks questions, or 
raises them for our asking. And looking around one 
finds the questions take the shape and character of an 
enigma. These people, having finished their prayer, 



46 JAPAN 

turn about, and while yet but moving from among the 
crowd of their fellow-petitioners, they smile, laugh — 
broadly, almost hilariously — at themselves, at anything, 
at nothing. The laughter of the lately-praying mingles 
its staccato trebles and basses with the mournful murmur 
of the presently-praying. And fowls and pigeons 
flutter and bob over the heads and among the feet of 
both crowds — the praying and the laughing. The 
cocks even crow — a clarion petition to any odd god 
that will list, re-echoing high among the dusty rafters. 
And the laughing crowd that but lately prayed, they 
pick up their children and run laughing to a god in 
wood seated in serene but maimed majesty on a pedestal 
to the right of the gloomy shrine. This is the god of 
the sick — of all the sick ; the divine doctor of all ills. 
For cataract it is but necessary to rub his divine eye and 
then to rub the human organ. This conveys the cure. 
For aneurism of the aorta one rubs the divine chest 
over the divine heart, and then the human chest where 
the human heart beats. He is, it seems, a very popular 
god. He is rubbed, as it may be said, to a shadow ot 
his first self. This is his popularity — an injurious 
popularity, which maims and disfigures. Having rubbed, 
not a lamp, but a god who is to accomplish equal magic, 
the laughing crowd tours the temple halls, buys its 
fortune ready-made at the booth of the paunchy priest, 
and trips lightly down into the world of vanities again 
— the perpetual fair in the grounds of this wonderful 
temple of the Goddess of Mercy. It has prayed ; now 
it will play. It has offered sacrifice to its gods ; now it 
is the turn of its mammon. The Question has become 
an enigma before one leaves the temple at Asakusa. 
One does not solve the enigma in the fair. It may 
there change to a riddle, nothing more. 



A JAPANESE QUESTION? 47 

The temple, its shrine, its gods, its priests, its 
votaries, its cocks and hens, its dust and dirt — these 
are all of the Old Japan ; and the crowd of believers, 
the ardour of their prayers, the things they pray for, 
are earnest of the power, the prestige, the unshaken 
dominion, the yet inviolate empire of the gods of the 
Old Japan in the midst of the Japan of the Revolution. 
In the temple grounds the Revolution is at work. Like 
other revolutions it chooses strange instruments. The 
Japanese country cousin, who offered vows to his local 
hamadryad this morning before setting out for the 
capital, may have his photograph done ' while he waits * 
in these groves of Kwannon, the goddess he loves. 
And he is photographed ' while he waits,' and he returns 
to his faun-ruled Arcadia with a message of revolution. 
But the country cousin is more profitably astounded by 
the brass band he hears at Asakusa. This, indeed, is a 
new world ! Not content with the co-operation of his 
ears the Japanese of town or country hears our Western 
music — or more commonly a screaming caricature of it 
— with all his mouth. He hears it at Asakusa, and 
seed of the Revolution is sown in his heart. The 
trombone rains grape-shot on the entrenchments of the 
embattled dryads, who have naught but wheezy incan- 
tations to reply withal. And the Revolution works 
upon another sense — other senses, here in Asakusa. 
It offers potions of potato brandy and mugs of dubious 
beer to the Japanese who has known only the native 
wine and loved it. Here, indeed, is another new world ! 
The Revolution conquers with dreams that lurk in 
tankards of loaded ale. For her service she arms the 
furies that hover in the fumes of the brandy -butt. 
These sow seeds of Revolution in the head. She 
has other allies, other legionaries ; open or disguised. 



48 JAPAN 

Edison's phonograph is here, claiming its crowd a yard 
or two away from the wide-eyed clientele of a juggler 
of Old Japan, himself vexed at the vogue of the cheap- 
jack, whose ribald eloquence makes his stock of Japanese 
pill-panacea and imitation English soap disappear with- 
out legerdemain. There is the itinerant electric battery 
with beneficial shocks at a halfpenny, and in the shanty 
under the pine tree a skirt-dance shocks both Oriental 
and Occidental proprieties. 

So moves the Revolution of manners in these pre- 
cincts of the temple of Kwannon in Tokyo — the temple 
and its gods and its worship as yet impregnable, or 
apparently so. The silent, inscrutable power that 
came out of India and the visions of Sakyamuni, 
remains silent, inscrutable, powerful ; high above the 
conflict, clear of the whirlpool. The people pray at 
Asakusa with their ancient ardour, the god of the sick 
is whittled away as ruthlessly as of old ; he comes as 
speedily as ever to devotional ruin, to sacrificial dissolu- 
tion. But the people are playing differently at Asakusa. 
They hold to their ancient worships, but concede their 
former entertainments. They cling to their crucifix, 
but give away their toys. 

What does it all mean if not Enigma and a Ques- 
tion.'' They are quoted the English of the East, these 
people, but in Asakusa the quotation changes to an 
interrogation — May a Race forget its Origins ? For it 
is chiefly a memory of the people who pray that I take 
away with me from Asakusa. 



VII 

THE REVOLUTION CORRUPTED 

Now, though you may safely compliment your Japanese 
friend when he takes you to his house in suburban 
Azabu of Tokyo on his fine refusal to disturb the sweet 
simplicity of his Japanese home with the horrible dis- 
cords of European ' innovations,' your Japanese friend 
may not respond with the aptest trope, as, ' Yes, we 
have defended and we will defend our hearths and 
homes against the Revolution.' Being a gentleman, he 
will not insult you through the Revolution. Besides, 
there is no hearth in his house, and there is no Japanese 
word quite equal to your ' home.' * Yes, we do pre- 
sume to make a stand upon our unworthy braziers, 
and by your leave we still contemptibly sit upon the 
floor ' — the heroic trope does not gain upon adaptation to 
Japanese utensils and habits. There is a clear need 
of some happier expedient to permit your Japanese 
friend to say what he might justly say in response to 
your compliment. 

For, even as the sunshine streaming in spear-grass 
streaks between the shanks of the high bamboo fence 
enclosing the house has resisted contamination, so has 
the Japanese house, and so also the people of it, when 
they are of it. It is the ancient, unadulterated sunshine 
of Japan, and the house is an unconquered, unyielding 

49 E 



50 JAPAN 

stronghold, a fortress of old manners and modes. Nor 
does the Revolution even clamour at the doors of the 
house ; it has failed as yet to take the bamboo fence. 
Even that frail, slim outwork still withstands the siege ; 
I mean that the garden is Japanese. The little walks 
still constrict themselves between pretentious little 
mounds and wheel coquettishly to right and to left, to 
lure you on to a game of hide-and-seek which is all 
make-believe, for your eyes can follow them over and 
behind the mounds to their uttermost flights, fifteen, 
twenty long yards away. They launch recklessly upon 
mighty bridges of two three-foot spans, crossing mighty 
lakes three inches deep. And the dwarf pines on the 
little mounds look pertly down on the little walks, and 
wave a baby arm in salute to the water-lily buried to 
the ears in the mighty lake, like a swimmer treading 
water — a baby arm which may be a hundred years old, 
but looks a sprout of this spring. And the stalwart, 
unsmiling ancient, greyish on the temples with a scurf 
of leaden -white fungus, the stone lantern, its shaft 
cunningly rounded as if to simulate the entasis of a 
mighty burden-bearing column, stands guard under the 
friendly shade of the clump of young cedars, whose 
foliage the winds caress with a whispering but a fleeting 
love. Oh, yes ! it is all Japanese, this garden, which 
plays so prettily at being a terrible land of mountains 
and forests, unfathomable lakes, and tracks like the 
inmost web of dreams. 

The Revolution, you see, is swept back from the 
gate of the bamboo fence, and the fence itself is strong 
enough to resist its terrible tide. The mathematical 
parterres, the rectangular paths, the elliptical flower 
plots, the planary surface — all of the garden of 
Europe — have not yet entered here. There is a zone 



THE REVOLUTION CORRUPTED 51 

to cross before the attack can be delivered on the 
house. It is the Japanese garden, and the Revolution 
hasn't planted a foot there yet ; scarcely, I suppose, won 
over the winds to carry seed of an alien flower to be 
sown surreptitiously, furtively, where the iris blows 
with its drooping lips, and the mop-headed chrysan- 
themum spreads its tousled magnificence in the sun's 
eye. 

There are sufficient reasons why the assault of the 
Revolution on the Japanese home has hitherto failed. 
There are reasons sufficiently abstruse and philosophical, 
derivable, no doubt, from considerations and examina- 
tions of the phenomena of the Japanese character and 
civilisation, issuing in the affirmation of very profound 
and very interesting theories. I prefer to suppose that 
the Japanese house, and its incorruptible ally, the 
Japanese garden, win because unitedly they corrupt 
the enemy. It is impossible to think of a sustained 
beleaguer of the Japanese house and garden by the 
most hardily venomous invader. The Revolution 
melts before their charming solicitude. Its fierceness 
is first surprised, secondly assuaged, thirdly seduced. 
And lo ! the Revolution, infatuated, becomes an ally ! 

You remove your boots and you step into your 
Japanese friend's drawing-room through the wall. In 
time, with some visiting of Japanese friends in their 
Japanese houses, you, who have worn boots or shoes 
since you began to walk, may begin to look upon them 
with loathing. At first you are amused at a custom — 
you think it is a custom — which requires you to take 
off your boots before you enter your friend's house. 
You feel that for the time being you do not belong to 
yourself ; you give yourself into the hands of this highly 
diverting custom — cheerfully, laughingly, half-resignedly . 



52 JAPAN 

You are willing to try the experiment ; you are willing 
to be experimented on ; ' for the experience ' perhaps. 
By and by, when you have lived a while in the country, 
you are irritated. It is no longer amusing ; the law 
now seems to be not so much a law or custom, as a silly, 
stupid convention, maintained by Japanese pig-headed 
conservatism. You almost feel that you are insulted ; 
you sympathise with your boots, and feel disposed to 
defend them from the recurring injury. ' Love me, 
love my boots,' your mood means. But there is a third 
stage. In the flash of a sudden inspiration, insight, 
original sympathy, on some clean-skied evening, when 
the sun's level rays fall upon the mats of your friend's 
drawing-room — the wall having been slid out of the 
way — and turn them to pure, shimmering gold, spotless 
as your mother's Sunday table linen, — then you loathe 
your boots, then you detest them, then you own a latent 
shame of your even entering your Japanese friend's 
garden with them. This, my friend, is to become a 
Japanese. It is to change your nation ; to be natural- 
ised ; it is to see with Japanese eyes and feel with 
Japanese sense. When you loathe your boots there is 
hope of your understanding Japan. The convention, 
custom, law, has acquired a fourth and final character. 
You perceive that it is a necessity, a law — a necessity, a 
law of the Japanese religion of Beauty. It is also what 
I have already said : it is the corruption of the enemy. 
You were the Revolution ; you are now Conservatism, 
Reaction if you like. Prejudice, Ignorance, Tyranny, 
anything save a defiler of the Japanese house, anything 
but a lover of your own boots ! 

In a measure — let me interject — it is true that to 
love the Japanese garden and the Japanese house is to 
come within the last pale of the Japanese Mystery ; it. 



THE REVOLUTION CORRUPTED S3 

is to be competent to explore the penetralia of the 
shrine. A subsequent course of the ritual and worships 
is a denationalisation ; its end is hate, of the complexion, 
the figure, the gait, the dress, of your own country- 
women — the seal of your Japanese identity. Men have 
found it so : nasal Americans, high-toned Englishmen. 
They have lived in Japan to detest the manners of 
their own sisters. It is the penalty they pay ; or is it 
their reward ? 

You have entered your friend's drawing-room 
through the wall. Do not expect to leave it through 
the floor. All that is required of you with respect to 
the floor is that you sit upon it and eat from it. 
Should you wish to go to the next room, another wall 
will be removed for you ; half of it will slide along the 
grooves in its containing beams. You may have a 
cushion brought you to sit upon, not because the mats 
are not clean enough, but possibly because their softness 
is not soft enough. The mats have a skin of closely- 
woven straw, which is packed to a thickness of an inch 
and a half or so. They are parallelograms, six feet by 
three. The room is made for the mats, not the mats 
for the room ; so the mats fit exactly, and you have a 
floor, smooth and even as a billiard table, marked by 
the lines of the mat borders, which are of list, or, in 
great houses and great temples, of figured cloth or 
silk. 

The drawing-room is not what you have been 
accustomed to in drawing-rooms. It might be parlour, 
hall, bedroom, or even kitchen. So far as the unlearned 
stranger may remark there is nothing to distinguish the 
Japanese drawing-room from the Japanese nursery or 
the Japanese cock-loft, for there is nothing, or next to 
nothing, in it. It is, that is to say, entirely, explicitly 



54 JAPAN 

Japanese, even in these days of the Revolution. On 
the sliding walls there are monochrome cranes and carp 
and the outlines of craggy mountains ; the ceiling is 
polished pine, on which the eccentric ellipses of the 
grain move and melt when you change your viewing 
point, like the figures in watered silk. You mark 
these features of the room easily and quickly, even as 
you dispose, or try to dispose, yourself comfortably on 
the floor. By and by you will observe the furniture of 
the room. You will observe a vase of chrysanthemums 
on a little lacquered stand, in the partial gloom of an 
alcove in the one permanent wall of the room. This 
vase is the furniture. It distinguishes the drawing- 
room from the kitchen and the parlour. It is Japanese, 
not of the Revolution. With a little education, a little 
progress in love of the Japanese house and the Japanese 
garden, even the stranger perceives that it is sufficient ; 
that it is fit ; that chairs and a sideboard would be 
disaster ; disaster amid which Beauty, violated, would 
die. 

The brazier — the Japanese hearth which is not a 
hearth — is brought, and tea in cups of the capacity of 
a sherry glass. It is Japanese tea — even a Minister of 
State serves his European visitor with the native tea, 
which, curiously, is pure in proportion of its resemblance 
to water. It is delicious when one knows it. One 
comes to think that Europe has not yet tasted tea. 

After the brazier and the tea tray, perhaps with the 
latter, comes your friend's wife. It is at her coming 
that the inviolability of the Japanese home, its resolute 
defiance of the Japanese Revolution, is fully revealed to 
you. Your friend calls a servant, with the voice which 
speaks to a servant. One appears, shy, awkward, 
ashamed, or possibly smiling weakly, as if by order. 



THE REVOLUTION CORRUPTED SS 

There are some words of Japanese from your friend. 
Then to you he says, ' My wife,' and the Japanese lady, 
late servant, your friend's wedded wife, kneels, and 
placing her palms on the floor, bends low until her 
forehead touches the floor between her palms. It is 
your part, of course, to do the same ; yet I fancy it 
should be more out of European chivalry than Japanese 
etiquette that you do the same. This is the beginning 
and the end of your introduction to your friend's wife. 
Your friend may ask a question of her, arising out of 
some question of yours. For the rest she is companion 
to the vase in the recess. Even her silver-grey silk is 
in complete harmony with the room. She suits with 
its incomparable sweetness and its supine unobtrusive- 
ness. The room is a study in greys — completely, 
charmingly successful. So is she. The room is a 
study which is never positive, and she is almost a 
negation. Herein is she wholly Japanese. The 
Revolution — it is a reminiscence, a dream, a murmur 
of a sea beyond the horizon, when your friend's wife 
is introduced. The wife being a soul, you do not know 
whether to be charmed or to be saddened, whether to 
admire or to regret. The room, the house, the garden ; 
they feel nothing, and may be allowed to remain charm- 
ing ; they sufl^er nothing. But your friend's wife — to 
see the soul that speaks furtively from her eyes is to 
wish she were more of a discord ; recalling the widening 
freedoms of your sisters beyond the seas, you are apt to 
desire that the Revolution may come unto her, even if 
her silver-grey be dyed to red by it, and herself changed 
to a woman. At present she is part of the theme of 
the room — one of the semitones of its exquisite harmony. 
She is companion to the painted crane on the wall. 
This, then, is the Japanese Home, its outward 



S6 JAPAN 

aspects, the appearances it presents to the new stranger. 
These are its clothes, some of them ; part at least of its 
outward seeming. Its heart is the Japanese Mystery, 
the Japanese Question, the locked casket of Japanese 
origins, which, it is believed, no disciple of European 
philosophies has yet opened, the casket of origins which, 
if you accept the burden of testimony among foreigners 
resident in Japan for truth, may yet one day, even now, 
after all the iconoclasms of a half century which has 
been like a millennium for revolutions, fly open and set 
free a cloud of furies. 

Personally I believe it is more probably fairies that 
the casket holds. This, however, is scarcely the perti- 
nent matter. One is chiefly puzzled to know whether 
the Revolution should storm the Japanese garden and 
the Japanese house in order to rescue the Japanese wife. 
When you love the Japanese garden and the Japanese 
house it seems a great price to pay for a wife, who, any 
way, cannot be your wife. It would be an inartistic 
war ; but it might be humanity. 



VIII 

ON THE MARGINS OF THE SOUL 

There is the Japanese Home and there are the institu- 
tions which it harbours. Paradox being so often syllo- 
gism, chaos so often cosmos in the Japan of to-day, it 
might not be very surprising to find that the institutions 
had been revolutionised, while the house, their home, 
remained intact, untainted, aboriginal. In this instance, 
however, it is the expected — or is it the unexpected ? — 
that happens. The institutions of the home are secure as 
the home itself, or more so, for while, for instance, there 
is or lately was a fashion of furnishing a reception room 
in well-to-do houses in the ' foreign style,' — that is to 
say, with all the decorative appurtenances of a Western 
drawing-room — the Japanese fashion in marriage, for 
example, is insulted by no temerous innovator. The 
Japanese lover woos and marries in the fashion of his 
ancestors, unblessed with revolutionary knowledge or 
the means of it. Here is food for thought of the 
sociologist. Does the Japanese lover, by his inalienable 
devotion to the fashion of his fathers in love, demon- 
strate this institution the hinge of human character, the 
foundation of being, the motive of life .'' The question 
seems worth some inquiry. I contribute a fact. Japan 
has adopted parliamentary institutions ; she follows the 
light of the most modern science in her education ; she 

57 



58 JAPAN 

writes her Navy log-books in English ; but her sons 
make love through middlemen, and the climax of the 
marriage ceremony is a mutual drinking from a mutual 
wine-cup. It is hardest, it seems, to convert a people 
to a new mode in marriage. It is in the affair of love 
that their profoundest affections and conservatisms 
reside. Is this affair, then, the heart of the heart 
of man ? 

In Japan love is an affair of diplomacy, and marriage 
a formal treaty of alliance. It has always been so, and 
it is so to-day — unequivocally and in the teeth of Revo- 
lution. Your Japanese young man, having arrived at 
marriageable age, inquires of his parents what arrange- 
ments they have made. They may have betrothed him 
while he, poor child, was still being bumped on the back 
of his elder sister, aged nine — children, you remember, 
are carried pick-a-back in Japan, and children carry them 
so. Engagements — some engagements — are very long 
in Japan ; almost as long as life itself, dating from the 
cradle. An infant betrothal is itself an affair of high 
diplomacv. But if there has been none it is still diplo- 
macy. The young man may indeed be, as it were, his 
own sovereign. There is a lady he may have seen ; 
there may even be one with whom he is in love. But 
it is still diplomacy. Sovereign-like, he may have an 
object in his eye, but, sovereign-like, he must accom- 
plish it through his agent — through diplomacy. His 
own father is his agent, or his uncle, or his sister's 
husband. It is altogether improper for him to be his 
own agent. The agent has the recognition and sanction 
of a title. He is the tiakodo, meaning middleman. 
Through him diplomacy smoothes the way to the treaty 
of alliance. The young man may hint of the path the 
diplomacy of his agent should pursue. More often the 



ON THE MARGINS OF THE SOUL 59 

agent is a plenipotentiary, in whose wisdom and dis- 
cretion an absolute trust is reposed. As plenipotentiary 
he looks about him, and a family of his acquaintance, 
which includes a marriageable daughter, receives a pre- 
liminary overture, or opening negotiation, from him. It 
is the parents who receive the overture ; the marriage- 
able daughter has only the passive importance of the 
territory about which the agents of real sovereigns 
negotiate. The parents of the young woman receiving 
the overture favourably, a pretty crisis comes upon the 
agent. He will now arrange a meeting of the parties, 
the young man and the young woman. Usually it is 
this meeting which crowns or wrecks the plenipotentiary's 
labours. The meeting is probably a family picnic, of 
the real intent of which the young man and young 
woman are usually informed. The meeting — it is 
called the ' see-meeting ' — may issue in an immediate 
rupture of negotiations. The young man may be dis- 
satisfied with the auguries. Of the young woman this is 
less likely to be so ; it is hers to consent to act the intense 
passivity of the disputed hinterland, and she consents. 
Both parties satisfied, both families approving, the day 
is fixed without more ado. There is an exchange of 
presents, which is, in a sort, a solemn seal of the contract 
of marriage — more properly, perhaps, part of the cere- 
mony. There is the ceremonious introduction of the 
bridegroom elect to the family, especially to the father, 
of his bride. Then there is the marriage, on a day 
which the family astrologer will select after spelling the 
stars and casting mystic horoscopes. The astrologer's 
importance is second only to that of the middleman, 
who is the presiding genius in all the solemnities. The 
marriage ceremony is a social ritual of which the burden 
is a mutual pledge in a triple draught of sake^ the 



6o JAPAN 

national wine, from a mutual cup, by bride and bride- 
groom. 

So the Japanese lover of to-day as of yesterday loves 
by proxy ; so is he very nearly married by proxy. 
And this is the Old Japan, unassailed, almost unchallenged 
to-day, when elsewhere you can see Revolution stalking 
through the land with a ruthless sword in a ruthless 
hand. 

The same, or more, is to be said of Japan's family 
life in all its ramifications — of all the institutions and 
modes harboured by the Japanese Home, itself protected 
by the garden zone. Politically, philosophically, educa- 
tionally, ethically, Japan hesitates from few experiments ; 
domestically, socially, in her family order and forms, she 
withholds from all. Death, the final family concern under 
the Revolution, is death as it always was. It is crema- 
tion — except as this is forbidden by some of the native 
sects — it is transmigration, re-incarnation ; funerals, 
elaborate, picturesque, ceremonious ; and a strange im- 
mortality under the name of ancestor-worship. Male 
progeny is of paramount importance now as always, and 
the baby-girl is almost as little deemed an acquisition 
as ever she was. The rule of the head of the family, 
be he father or eldest son, is autocratic as of old, and 
filial piety shines cardinal red in the lustre of the virtues. 
Filial piety has immortalised some ordinary murderers 
in Japan ; even yet it hallows forms of criminality. 

In fact, upon the working theory of the Revolution 
this should be the sphere, these the phenomena, of the 
soul of the land, for it is here difficult to detect even a 
meagre, microscopic, one-eightieth fraction of accom- 
plished change, of consummated revolution. The living 
hierarchy of deities of the Japanese hearth, and the 
ritual and liturgies of the worship offered them, are the 



ON THE MARGINS OF THE SOUL 6i 

primitive, traditional, original, hierarchy, and ritual and 
liturgies of pre-revolution eras. Family life, domestic 
habitudes, in the Japan of this year are almost to the 
last respect the life and habitudes of the land before the 
great conversion. Has the land then been converted ^ 
Has there been a Revolution.^ Is the old man really 
put off, the new put on ^ In fine, has the Revolution 
touched the nation's soul .'' It is an invidious question. 

Examine the skirt, the broiderings, the hem-stitching 
of the garment of the nation's soul — the nation's social 
as distinct from its purely family or domestic habit — 
and you may find some threads of Innovation, of Revision, 
of Change. 

Take the greatest of Japanese social institutions — 
the bath. The bath is everything in Japan, a habit, a 
necessity, a luxury, a daily expense, a daily entertain- 
ment, a discipline, a dissipation. To all Japan it is as 
good as the play ; to part of Japan it is, I am persuaded, 
life itself. You are told that in the country hamlet it 
is the one boon that makes the Japanese labourer's life 
worth living to him. I believe it. It is the public- 
house of the people, where they drink nothing but the 
water they incontinently gulp during the cold douche ; 
it is the hundred -moot of the nation, for there is 
no class save the people in the Japanese bath-house. 
Popular enfranchisement is a far-off ideal in the mind 
of the philosophical radical of Japan. No matter : there 
is the bath-house ; its habitues^ who are the Japanese 
nation, are already a democracy. There is nothing like 
the Japanese public bath-house anywhere in the world. 
It is the only peculiar badge of the nation ; it alone 
represents a characteristic by which the Japanese can be 
finally and infallibly distinguished from the other races 
of the earth. ' Which is the people that bathes } ' 



62 JAPAN 

should, with a wider knowledge of Japan and the 
Japanese, be as plain an ethnological hint as ' Which is 
the nation that drinks lager ? ' or ' Which the race that 

o 

makes bulls ? ' I think I have written that the Japanese 
people cannot be classified by national attributes. I am 
wrong. They are the bathers of the world. 

There are between 800 and 900 public bath-houses 
in Tokyo, the capital. You cannot mistake them. 
They are, in fact, very shocking as you pass them in 
the dusk when their lamps are lit. You are walking 
along a black, stirless lane ; there is the rasp and bang 
of the opening of a door — a sliding door, of course. A 
square bar of yellow light belches athwart your way, 
and a small babel of thick, bubbling clatter, suddenly 
released, strikes your ear. Of course your head turns, 
and there in the square whence the yellow light comes 
is a Dore vision to your eyes, naked legs, chests, arms, 
backs ; whole bodies, upright, bent, crouching ; legs 
spread like callipers, arms spread for the cross ; the 
Laocoon, without the serpents ; a corner of the innocent, 
naked Golden Age, all of the yellow of an outworn 
copper, somewhat clarified by yellow lamplight, some- 
what muddled by gouts of steam expelled by a 
solfatara in the unseen background. And all this — 
there might be a score or thirty backs and pairs of legs 
— in the space of your bedroom. As a new stranger in 
the land you are terribly shocked, but you are fascinated 
— shocked because you are convinced that before the 
vision is cut off, you behold human shapes besides 
those of men and boys ; fascinated because to you the 
vision is unique, unprecedented. In time you will be 
amused ; afterwards it is nothing. To the Japanese it 
is nothing. In time even you yourself may have a 
bath there, or in some other such public bath-house of 



ON THE MARGINS OF THE SOUL 63 

this revealing country. You would then unrobe with 
the crowd, take your turn in the tank of scalding 
water — the unseen solfatara of your first overwhelming 
vision — and, coming to a shivering recovery under the 
succeeding cold douche, would calmly dry and re-clothe 
your body and limbs, and fare forth with a new interest 
in life — all at a cost of little more than a half- 
penny, I have known discreet private gentlemen of 
my own race who have taken their Japanese bath in the 
hot water tank with a Japanese family, and have come 
away not a penny the worse, nor a whit the wiser 
after it. 

This, then, is the public bath-house of Tokyo — 
eight or nine hundred of them — save that I do not 
translate its debates, or try to disclose or interpret its 
spirit of democracy which, for the short time of his 
being there, levels the English-speaking Japanese to 
the grade of the cobbler, with the former's full 
consent. 

In the large towns the Revolution has instituted 
separate baths for the separate sexes ; it has also very 
generally caused the erection of a partition between 
the two departments. The partition has doors, and 
it need not of necessity reach to the ceiling. Hence 
your suspicion of figures other than male in the human 
phantasmagoria of your first alarming vision was 
probably quite correct, only these do not, here in 
Tokyo, climb into the bath with the others. In the 
provinces — in the remote towns, in the villages that 
live alone, where the charcoal-seller and the cartwright's 
assistant are public personalities — there the Revolution 
has erected no partition ; it may scarcely yet decree 
a separate bath. In the simple, unsuspecting, gullible 
country — where no faint echo of the censorious voice 



64 JAPAN 

of Europe, nor any gleam of its rebuking eye, has 
come, where not so long since the peasant on a 
mountain side introduced his wife in her unadorned 
nakedness to the missionary from London — there the 
only bath-house is a tub under the eaves of the house, 
unsuspicion of evil the only partition, priority of use 
the only separation. 

So the Revolution accomplishes little of change 
upon the face of this chiefest of Japan's social 
institutions. 

And one finds the persistency of the nation's birth- 
marks elsewhere on the skin of its social body. When 
it leaves the bath-house the nation is one of castes 
which cut each other dead almost as of old. The 
Japanese official sees a fly on a post more readily than 
his poor relative hawking macaroni. He and his 
class are demi-gods, the rest are cheese-mites. And 
the mites consent. You may see them in Tokyo 
crawling towards a police-box, beggars of permission 
to exist, doffing their head-gear with a deprecatory face 
of humility which would doff the head which the gear 
covers if it might at the same time save its lips to 
lisp its grovelling petition. And the policeman — he 
inflates his little chest and consents to hear the 
petition, but not to see the petitioner or the public 
rabble which gathers to hear the purport of this 
invocation of the gods. And the public rabble on 
its part squares accounts with the old outcast class — 
the Eta^ which, under the old regime, slaughtered 
cattle, removed the dead, carted away dung, and 
lived in their own quarter of the city, despicable, bestial, 
half-human. All this is officially done away ; there 
is no Eta class in the order of society now ; they can 
live where they care and make fortunes if they can. 



ON THE MARGINS OF THE SOUL 6s 

But in the circle of the highly respectable umbrella- 
maker it is not forgotten against the prosperous 
butcher of to-day that his father and mother were 
eta; and it is a curt ' no thank' you ' to any proposal 
from the prosperous ex-eta butcher of the affiancing of 
his daughter to the heir of the honourable family of 
clog-makers in the next street. 

We are here, it seems, down among the strata 
of the national character ; among origins ; we are 
delving in the soul of the land ; at any rate we are 
upon its margins. The surface has been scratched 
by the Revolution ; perhaps ploughed and prepared 
for a new crop. It is even possible that the subsoil 
has been disturbed. The new Education, newspapers, 
conscription, the presence and life of people of the 
Western nations in the land are some of the influences 
and examples disturbing, deranging, unsettling the old 
intimate hierarchy of the Japanese hearth ; the gods 
of the mean streets of the land. These are the 
messengers and agents of the Revolution to the 
private alleys of the nation's daily walk. The national 
policy — the ideas and the aims of the national leaders, 
of the men who order and command the chaos of the 
Revolution — the national policy which is the Revolution 
itself, does not guide its scalpel round and about the 
integuments of the national heart, incising where 
disease is. The physician operates on this region 
rather by subcutaneous injection. The Revolution 
here educates, permits free expression of reactionary 
bile ; it induces the people to give its blood for the 
country's service, and thereby opens its eyes to great 
realities. The Revolution may use the surgeon's 
knife to lop a national limb, but not his scalpel to 
convert or to cure the national heart. And is not 

F 



66 JAPAN 

the Revolution wise ? As operations on the heart are 
not yet part of the practice of chirurgery, so the 
reform of modes in love and marriage has not yet 
been brought within the principles of any recognised 
science of politics. Yet this is not to say that Japan 
may not attempt even this. 



IX 

PASSIVE REACTION 

* Let us arrive at Okayama in the dusk, have some- 
thing to eat there, leave for the place after dark, see 
It, and walk — or rikisha — back in the morning to 
catch the 8.30 train north. We can sleep in the train 
— or think.' 

* Or dream,' said the Alter Ego quizzingly. 

' Let us see it apart from its individuality,' 1 said. 

' But you cannot see it apart from your individuality.' 

' There is the Imagination,' I said. 

' So, but even that is your own, and Scotch.' 

' Well, let's see it anyway.' 

We were both students of the Revolution ; he, I 
think, without emotion. He sought to measure it, to 
account for it, to delimit it, to determine its scope, 
to map its frontiers. He liked also to dissect it. I 
sought to make a picture of it. To me it was an 
Ideal ; to him a problem, political, ethical, psycho- 
logical. I think I have enjoyed it most, though I 
have never made a finished picture of it. I doubt if 
he has accounted for it save to himself. Between us 
we were the Function of Criticism. He analysed ; I 
looked for synthesis — for the synthesis which justifies 
Revolutions. 

Well, we boarded our train, travelling second-class. 

67 



68 JAPAN 

Next to the third it is the best of the three classes for 
the student. In the third you might see and hear 
most were it not so often necessary to put your head 
out of the window. In the third you are compelled 
to interrupt your studies of the people with a frequent 
scrutiny of the permanent way. The Japanese folk, 
you see, are prodigious travellers. It is a people which 
is always in motion ; on foot, by rikisha, per railway 
train. Tokyo maintains fifty thousand rikisha-pullers, 
one per thirty inhabitants. Per railway train they 
travel at a farthing a mile third-class. And they 
travel — everywhere, wherever the railway goes, on the 
least provocation, many old ladies to visit the chaste 
little tombs of their ancestors, on the brow of a green 
hill two, three, four provinces away, over many sunlit 
horizons. So it is far from comfortable travelling in 
the third-class carriages of Japanese railways. 

The Revolution nevertheless has given to Japan 
railways which the people of Great Britain may expect 
in their country a generation hence. In Japan they 
have everything that we lack, and everything that we 
have, except speed. Perhaps British railway companies 
do well to concentrate their energies on speed. It 
may be believed that on no other condition would 
they be tolerable. ' If we don't make you comfort- 
able,' they say, — to the third-class, for which their 
charge is a Japanese company's tariff for first-class, — 
' If we don't make you comfortable, at least we try 
to rescue you from your torture as quickly as possible. 
We don't keep you on the rack so long as the 
Ottoman railways or the Australian companies.' In 
Japan the railway companies make a different arrange- 
ment. ' We can't do twenty miles an hour, but then 
we try to make you so comfortable that the time 



PASSIVE REACTION 69 

seems as short as a mile per minute.' This proposal 
is of course made especially with regard to the first- 
class, but it is carried out very much also with regard 
to the second. In England the railway traveller is in 
purgatory for a short time ; in Japan he is confined 
to a finely upholstered sitting-room for a while. Thus 
described, the Japanese manner is much the better. 

And Japan, like the rest of the world, except 
England, makes your railway ticket a guide to your 
compartment in the train. The carriages are, indeed, 
labelled in English, ' First,' ' Second,' ' Third,' but this 
is not necessary. Is your ticket green ^ Walk up 
the platform till you find a green-painted carriage. 
White is first-class ; red, third ; green, second. On 
occasion of hurry this arrangement is a convenience 
for passengers, so the Japanese railways adopt it. 

Well then, we boarded our train, travelling second- 
class. Happily it was morning — the early forenoon. 
Had it been night, say after 8 p.m., we should have 
encountered an unpleasant, embarrassing fact about 
railway travelling in Japan. It is a puzzling fact in 
its way. I do not account for it, nor does the Alter 
Ego. Enter a second-class car on a Japanese railway 
after night has fallen and you find the Japanese race 
unmasked. From a race of pleasant, polite, deprecating 
folk they are changed to unmitigated boors. The 
seating runs corridor - wise along the sides of the 
carriage. Where forty might be accommodated, twelve 
or fifteen will have taken possession. A Japanese 
travelling by night pays for a single seat and uses 
three or four if he is not forestalled. All he requires 
is liberty to make his bed on the settee, and having 
taken liberty before your coming, he lies on his bed 
and sees you stand, or sit on an elbow rest — if this 



70 JAPAN 

be not appropriated for his pillow — until the train 
boy is induced by your vehemence to pray him, with 
many ' honourables,' to concede enough space for you 
to sit upon. So it is that in Japan you may enter a 
car for forty to find that less than a score have appro- 
priated everything but the floor. This is one of the 
times when you do not love Japan, for there is no 
situation more damaging to a man's faculty of charity 
than that wherein you then find yourself. The facts 
are astounding. A nation, authenticated the most 
gifted of all in the graces of life, keeps you out of 
sitting-room for which you have paid, which they 
have stolen ! I leave the puzzle as it stands. I 
don't suppose it is at all important beside the great 
fact of the Revolution, but it is there, for your 
exasperation when you travel second-class by night on 
a Japanese railway. 

Well, then, we boarded our train. We had tea at 
wayside stations — tea, tea-pot, and tea-cup, all for less 
than a penny ; tea-pot and tea-cup our possession for 
ever, and nothing charged for the amusement of drink- 
ing from a large-sized thimble — the cup. We saw 
again, as you always see in Japanese railway trains, the 
swollen, waddling, copper-red Japanese husband of the 
better trading-class which is able to travel second (first- 
class in Japan is a penny a mile ; second, half that ; third, 
half that again) — an Oriental Silenus, but altogether 
clean in person ; we saw him climb into the carriage, 
waddle to a seat, kick off his clogs, gather up the skirts 
of his toga, and cross his legs tailor-fashion as he sank 
royally down, grunting guttural dissatisfaction at the 
tardiness of a little pale-faced, nervous Japanese lady 
who apologised for brushing my knees with her dress, 
as, following in his wake, she peeped out of her half- 



PASSIVE REACTION 71 

drawn eyelids for a corner in which to efface herself. 
The lady was wife to the Silenus. When the Silenus 
would make a purchase of oranges she re-entered our 
little world ; she came fully to life when he prepared 
to leave the train a station or two before we too should 
go. But he does not beat her at home or anywhere, 
they say, and he is rather a good sort when you know 
him. It is even said that he is undemonstrative on 
principle. He loves his wife, but it's none of your 
business, and his railway-train manner with her is said 
to be his way of telling you so — the application of his 
principle. 

So we came to Okayama, a great city, in the fall of 
a March afternoon, cold, brisk, gusty. We left the 
monstrous clatter of the Japanese railway station, and 
declined to give our bodies into the hands of the 
Japanese rikisha-puller, who in the big towns is a 
licensed brigand who holds you for ransom under the 
name of his legal fare. There is a celebrated garden at 
Okayama, but it was not in our minds. Besides, early 
March is a unique time in Japan. Lamentably unique, 
it has no flowers. It is between the sprightly time of 
the pink plum-blossoms on their cerise-tinted sprays and 
the merry time of the rose-and-white cherry blossoms 
on their lichened twigs. It is long before the halcyon 
times of wistaria, azalea, iris, morning glory, which in 
Japan flourish under skies of May and June with the 
luscious impudence of weeds in our gardens. No, the 
celebrated garden of Okayama need not be in our minds 
in early March. 

We dodged a couple of pursuing rikishas and found 
the upper room of an unpretentious inn. ' O Hana 
San,' we said to the maid, who is always smiling and is 
always ready to chatter, * we will have fried fish and 



72 JAPAN 

an omelette — you cook such here, eh ? — and — beeroo.' 
' Hei ! ' said she, and toddled off, leaving us a great delft 
jar, holding glowing charcoal, and returning quickly 
with the tea, which is like the liberty you get in Japanese 
inns to sit upon the floor, in that it does not appear in 
the bill. 

When we had eaten and drunken it was night, the 
sky green-blue and clear of smudge as a new-swept 
floor, but bejewelled with winking stars. After some 
questioning we caught up the road on the outskirts of 
the town. We left the spluttering alleys, yellow with 
lamplight from the open-fronted shops. Our way was 
towards a faint wraith of zodiacal light fading from the 
western heaven even at our way-going. It would dis- 
appear soon, but there were the stars. 

Save for its own mountain outlines and its own 
narrow, rutty roads, a night walk in Japan is a night 
walk in England. On a plain and on one of the few 
wide roads it is the same at all seasons except in the 
tropic nights of July and August, when un-English 
fireflies bestreak the face of the dark with swift yellow 
dashes at all angles to the perpendicular of yo\ir looking. 
March is the March of England, and a March night 
is a March night of England. And night obliterates 
races ; the earth holds them but one nation. The day, 
it seems, is the source of national jealousies and wars. 
Hence we speak of the friendly night. In the night it 
is God and man ; in the day it is the English and the 
Japanese, the Russians and the Chinese. 

So we found it, my friend and I, on this walk away 
from warm, yellow, spluttering Okayama into a green- 
blue Japanese night of March. 

From the first we had much company besides our 
own, but, though feeling friendly under the stars, we 



PASSIVE REACTION 73 

spoke to none. Moreover, we made a pace to make 
heat for our coats and comforters to keep for us : it 
was raw cold. We passed houses and hamlets where 
people, not already on the road, were stirring to go, 
like us, to see. We walked eight, nine miles, and in 
the last five were never, I think, out of earshot of the 
padding of clogged feet or the prattling of tongues. 
Many carried lamps, though the night was clear. The 
wheels of rikishas rattled an irregular clatter on their 
axle-trees before and behind us. Soon we became part 
of a stream of people in which the occupiers of the 
rikishas were like tree-boles in a flood. There were 
comments upon us, friendly, of course, as of amused 
wonder at our coming to see. ' Foreigners ! Ha ! 
Ha ! they're coming to see ! ' Oh, friendly Night ! 

We came, to some extent, prepared by descriptions 
furnished us, but, nevertheless, the thing is always 
greater, more extraordinary, than its description. We 
had been in Japanese crowds before, many of them. 
We were told to expect this night to see a naked 
Japanese crowd. And now as we approached Saidaiji 
we perceived that we should see a Japanese crowd half 
of whom might be naked. It quickly became necessary 
to become one of the crowd, and as we recognised the 
necessity we began to meet the nakedness. They wore 
loin-cloths, indeed, but we came against the brawny 
flesh-pads of copper-coloured shoulders, and on occasion 
the press kept our eyes glued on the bed of a human 
spine or upon the nape of a human neck. Frequently 
the coppery expanse of a human back showed an 
irregular whitish splotch, the mark of a moxa cauter- 
isation. So we moved, often mechanically, contributing 
the motive power of our legs to the united, composite, 
unanimous force by which a multitude, confined within 



74 JAPAN 

limits, moves forward to an objective. Then we were 
in the town, Saidaiji, nine miles of irregular country 
from Okayama — Saidaiji, neither town nor village, but 
something between ; Saidaiji, to which we had come to 
see an extraordinary thing. 

We were in good time ; it lacked twenty minutes of 
midnight when we made the temple gate. I remember 
looking up at the unfamiliar midnight sky. The Great 
Bear rolled on his back twixt the North Star and the 
zenith. I was more used to seeing him on his feet and 
in his right mind at equal altitudes with his president 
star. The splendid individuality of Sirius shone well 
down the sky's western arch. I was more used to 
looking for him in the eastern heavens. But truly the 
sky was now present to neither of us ; nor did we care 
that a fine poetic night-wind seethed through the dense 
needles of the tall pines about the temple. 

It was not now the heavens and God. It was man ; 
men ; people ; a crowd ; a mob ; a multitude ; an army ; 
a nation ; a race. The newspapers of the day after said 
there were 200,000 of them, but the Japanese mind is 
curiously unskilled to apprehend numerical distinctions. 
Fifty thousand is a great number to it ; fifty million is 
about the same. So there might be twenty thousand 
or thirty thousand, or even fifty thousand. At any rate 
there was a wide country-side assembled, many villages, 
some townships, and mobs from cities. At the temple 
gate it looked like the Japanese race. We were taller 
by half a head than the Japanese race ; so we were 
swimmers looking along the level of a yellow sea, 
yellow turned to a golden, coppery red by the flare 
of many lights and the radiance of many paper lanterns, 
— a yellow sea mottled with the black foam of coaly 
hair fringing the faces. Far down the feeders of the 



PASSIVE REACTION 75 

sea — the alley-streets of the township — and upon its 
own wide bosom in the great temple enclosure — this 
with islands of temple buildings, shoals of shrubberies, 
and shores of tall dark firs — we might descry local 
eddies, obstructions, disturbances, by counting that we 
saw profiles and the backs of heads instead of an 
affronting rank of faces. Occasionally we jostled or 
were jostled by old men who gave us hilarious greeting 
when the uncommon impact caused them to look up to 
see our alien faces ; more often it was younger men, 
who merely shouted louder than before. 

I forget the shouting of this assembled nation. 
Chiefly the naked, who went in parties of from five 
to fifty, marching hither, thither, in the temple 
grounds, like mad platoons taken with a mild amock 
— chiefly their voices crowned the babel. In truth 
they moved but to have their nakedness the better 
defy the bitterness of the night wind of March. 
They shouted because, I suppose, noise is the chant 
of Superstition, as music, its angelic sister, is the 
chant of Religion. 'Yoisho! yoisho! yoisho! yoisho! 
yoisho ! yoisho ! ' endlessly repeated, is, on festival 
occasion, the chant of Superstition, of the religion 
of the labourer, in Japan. The cars of temple gods 
are brought forth on feast nights to be tremendously 
heaved on the arms of Labour to the time of its 
tremendous lilt — ' Yoi-sho ! Yoi-sho ! Yoi-sho ! ' 
It was this chant which crowned the babel of the 
night. You might say this assembled nation — 
the naked half of it — had gone Yoisho ! meaning 
mad, and was heedlessly proclaiming the fact to the 
world in the manner of madmen. 

Well, we entered the temple grounds, and for an 
hour lost our identities in the mass of the leviathan, the 



76 JAPAN 

monster whose body and limbs flowed, as it were, like 
a liquid mass into every channel and nook of Saidaiji, 
the township, and its great temple grounds. An un- 
imagined Saurian, whose huge substance was composed 
of human beings, had settled upon the face of the land. 
We lost our identities in it, being part of it, and our 
voices were drowned in its chant. 

An hour, and a new sound penetrated the heart of 
the babel. It was the roll of a drum, somewhat quick, 
but thick, as of an old drum. It came from the temple, 
and after it came a roar, a noise between a yell and an 
acclamation — the Saurian greeted the approach of its 
meal. Then the lights of the temple went out, and all 
others in the grounds. The Saurian put on a cloak of 
darkness. It was true Night again, with the starred 
sky overhead and the pines waving to us as if they 
would speak some secret. The leviathan roared again 
and again — for its meal — and the darkness remained. 

Another hour or less, and a sudden electric thing 
happened. There was commotion in the temple, and 
a quick, thrilling, unspeakable agitation on the face of 
the sea of dark faces spread out before it. From an 
aperture in the temple front came, it seemed, a stream 
of projectiles, falling with a short trajectory into the 
human sea — two bulky projectiles or bundles, as we 
could see, and a shower of small ones. It was the 
Saurian's meal ! There followed hell let loose. It was 
the naked half of the assembled nation which surged 
against the face of the temple. They were the jaws of 
the Saurian ; they waited for the meal, and, as I say, 
hell was let loose when it came to them. We were not 
posted high enough to see well. What we first saw 
seemed like a cave-in of the ground beneath the feet 
of portions of the naked mob. Three or four men 



PASSIVE REACTION 77 

collapsed over the objects thrown from the temple, to 
possess them, it seemed, and the contiguous crowd — a 
circular part of it, ten or fifteen deep — fell towards 
them and accumulated over them as if to fill up a 
subsidence. This appearance soon passed, and a vision 
of wild, whirling, wrenching, wrestling, writhing, 
demoniac humanity, swaying, heaving, rolling — this, 
the Indescribable — followed, all in the dark of the 
night. I retain a picture of one man — or devil. The 
fury of a battle swayed towards me. This man crawled 
from the legs of the fearful melee clenching an object 
with his arms. His forehead was smeared with blood. 
He was stark naked. His soul was in his eyes ; these 
expressed a desperate, drunken intensity — as if all the 
muscular force, or body, of the man had passed into 
his eyes, into his soul. He leaped free of the melee 
towards me ; then a thousand leaped on him, like water 
to a sudden outlet in a tank. He disappeared and I 
saw him no more, but I still see his face. 

The indescribable went on till dawn was near. 

We two — knowing the final event — took the road 
after an hour of it. 

In a while I asked the Alter Ego what he thought 
of it. 

' A village custom — festival if you like — tacked on 
to the indigenous Religion ; the yule-tide of England ; 
the Hallowe'en of Scotland.' 

' But its relation to the Revolution } ' 

' Oh, it hasn't any. The Revolution will merely 
overtake it.' 

' It is Reaction in its purity,' I said. 

* Reaction signifies activity ; this does not oppose 
the Revolution. It merely exists, entirely passive.' 

' Who knows } It hasn't been attacked.' 



78 JAPAN 

* No. There is no reason why it should be attacked. 
It is merely picturesque.' 

* To us,' I said. 

' Why should it be more to them ^ ' 

* Well, it is more. The man who collars the two 
feet of tree-trunk clutches eternal bliss.' 

' Well, let him. Why shouldn't he .? ' 

' Well,' I asked, ' is there anything more original, 
more completely free from taint of the Revolution, to 
be seen in the country ? ' 

' Why, yes. There are these hills.' 

A grey, pearly light, hinting the dawn, had risen 
low, like a pale corona, over a curtain of sharp-peaked 
highlands in the east. 

We had seen the eyo festival at the temple of 
Kwannon — Kwannon, as goddess of Mercy and all 
bounties, most justly hath her thousand shrines or 
more in the land — in Saidaiji, a small town of the 
province of Bizen, Central Japan. There are sacred 
trees near the temple. These are devoted to the uses 
of the festival, one per year. The tree of the festival 
being cut into pieces, in size varying from a chunk, two 
feet by eighteen inches, to a toothpick, becomes, with 
a priestly blessing and the efficacy of ceremonies, a 
precious vehicle of immortal good. The projectiles 
flung among the assembled Japanese nation, as we had 
seen, were the sacrificial tree-trunk, cut into blocks and 
toothpicks. Possession of them is fortune upon earth 
and a sweet hereafter. Hence the fury and some of 
the blood of battle we had seen, all in the deep, dawn- 
precluding dark of a March night. 

You may read accounts of this ceremonial, custom, 
affray, riot, inferno — what you please — in Japanese 
newspapers of 6th March, 1901. There are 100,000 



PASSIVE REACTION 79 

temples, or many more, in Japan. Most of them — 
all of them, I suppose — have their festival per year, 
per six months, or per three, each of its own kind 
and character. Perhaps the Japanese festival is really 
a public amusement. Anyhow, it is untouched, un- 
challenged, by the Revolution. 



X 

REVOLUTION HAPPILY IMPOSSIBLE 

You see Japan, and you ask yourself if it be fortunate 
or unfortunate that a People who, in the Advance of 
Civilisation, have covered five hundred years by a 
forced march of fifty — you ask if it be fortunate 
or unfortunate that they have not besought their 
mountains, their valleys, their rivers, their seas, their 
plains, their days and their nights, to come with them 
to an equal transformation. It is wonderful — is it not ? 
— that, in the orgy of Change which has overswept Japan, 
the incomparable physical loveliness of the land should 
emerge magnificent, majestic, wistful, winning, inspiring, 
incomparable, just as it was in the Feudal Age ; that 
the balsam of its breezes should be as soft and comforting, 
its airs as ' vernal,' as ever (save when they are laden 
with stercoral odours, as, I may tell you, they are 
everywhere within smell of cultivation at given seasons). 
In their fifty years' Festival of Iconoclasms the Japanese 
have not injured the fair image of their country. The 
hands of violence have been laid on institutions, 
manners, customs, ideas, worships : she alone is inviolate. 
And the incense with which she surrounds herself, the 
incense that rises from the censers she swings in spring, 
in summer, in autumn, in winter — it is the same incense, 
with the same intoxicating perfume, unimproved, un- 

80 



REVOLUTION HAPPILY IMPOSSIBLE 8i 

tainted, unadulterated, by any admixture of European 
essences. In their passion of Experiment the Japanese 
fortunately have not experimented here. For once — in 
one direction — it appears they have recognised and bowed 
before the Impossible — that is to say, the Perfect. 

It follows, of necessity, that there are no absurdities, 
no laughable juxtapositions of the ancient and modern, 
no paradoxes, no quixotic contrasts in what the geo- 
graphers call the physical features of this country. 
There is no unconscious humour here. Elsewhere there 
is the grotesque ; there is burlesque and farce. Here 
are the old lines of old Tragedy, the ancient rhythms of 
ancient Comedy. Here is Nature, which never dresses 
comically, which is never humorous. Here, in fact, is 
God, Unchangeable in the midst of Revolutions. 

One lives in this country to find that the tinted 
photograph has achieved much misrepresentation of 
Japan. It is true, doubtless, but it is true with a truth 
so narrow that it has become untruth. Hence is it 
more especially true of Japan that, so to speak, one 
must see it in order to see it. It is more especially 
true if one has seen or mayhap studied the photographed 
Japan. It is also true if one has seen much or studied 
much of the native Art. I accuse the incorruptible, do 
I not } I impeach, it seems, that Art which of all Arts 
should have no interest, no motive to misrepresent — for 
wherefore should it paint the lily or dye the rose a 
deeper red.? Yet neither the tinted photograph nor 
the native Art is Japan. Both are equally false, because 
equally true. They are both, that is to say, too 
narrowly true. 

For there is a nobleness in the face of the physical 
Japan which has never, I think, been told. It is never 
told in the coloured photograph, seldom or never in the 

G 



82 JAPAN 

native Art, and the Japanese dimly knowing it, if at all, 
have not spoken of it. Withal there is a subtle, 
electrical brilliance in Japanese suns — in the climate 
they make — which also waits to be adequately told. 
What the coloured photograph and the native Art tell 
is true about the quaintness, the oddity, the whimsicality 
of the nooks and crannies of Japanese mountains and 
seashores, though even as to this there is a qualification, 
the pictured or photographed oddity being more often 
a house, a temple, a tomb, than of Nature. If there be 
whimsicality, it is more the whimsicality of the Japanese 
than of their mountains and seas. And of their suns, 
it is true that they shine, but not always, nor always 
with the chastened, tolerable radiance which the native 
Art so finely speaks. There are other suns than the 
setting and dawning sun in Japan. There are suns 
that scorch and suns that shine blood -red through 
the rack of typhoons ; there are sick suns that omen 
earthquakes ; there are suns of the grey glooms of 
winter illumining the terrors of riven Alps. In fact, 
you find as you go along that the quality of sublimity 
has been forgotten or overlooked in most of the 
written or painted pictures of Japan. Eyes that see can 
see in Japan a noble stage which the current notion has 
hitherto conceived as merely a quaint one. To stand 
at the base of Fujiyama is to be shadowed by a nobler 
Olympus ; to view a world from the lips of its crater is 
to feel as one might who had come to the seats of Jove. 
The mountains of Nikko are fitter than Helicon for 
abode of the Muses. The sapphire of a Japanese 
summer sky is deeper than the blue of the JEgQSLn ; the 
typhoons of these latitudes lay cities prostrate. This 
quality of excess, no other than sublimity, is the truth 
of the physical and climatic rapture of the country. 



REVOLUTION HAPPILY IMPOSSIBLE 83 

Forget then the tinted photograph and the native 
Art. The one falsely reports an universal quaintness, 
the other as falsely an universal sweetness, an exemplary 
and consistent grace, in the aspect and weather of this 
land. Forget these misrepresentations. Or, at all 
events, they must be qualified. We must open the 
door to the extremes ; in other words, to the quality 
of sublimity. We want terror represented on this 
people's stage : the terror of mountains rugged and 
massive as the Jura Alps ; we want rigour : the 
rigour of a winter which clothes a third of the land 
in Alpine snows, a winter engendering blizzards, such 
as that of a year or two ago, wrapping two hundred 
fighting men in a white death ; we need the tornado 
and the earthquake to voice Disaster ; the eternal 
calm of Hakone, lake unfathomable, filling unfathom- 
able craters, to figure the deep serenity of gods, and 
the wide bosom of Biwa, chrysoprase sea in the lap ot 
the land, to deny the imputation of universal minute- 
ness. And the Inland Sea, hall of all the gems, we 
need to bear testimony against the exquisite narrowness 
and the picturesque mannerism of the native Art. For 
the triple crown of the Queen there should be the 
peerless 'Three' — Miyajima, temple in the waters; 
Matsushima, lagoon of a thousand islands ; Ama-no- 
hashidate, incredible freak of sea and shore, — these for 
the tiara of the high priestess of the cult of Beauty. 

The country, in fact, is graceful, smiling, neat, small, 
sentimental, quaint ; but it is likewise a giant, armed 
with terrors, a god, familiar with the sublime, wearing 
the robes of his divinity, his awful front garlanded 
with clouds. And the climate of Japan, while it 
* arranges ' mornings, evenings, and twilights which, if 
you like, are a mute expression of the gentle love of 



84 JAPAN 

the Earth Mother for her children ; while it paints 
skies with colours which, if you will, are mixed with 
the substance of dreams ; the climate, if this gentleness 
and this exquisiteness be true of it, holds also — in 
sympathy no doubt with the land to which it is 
married — the secret of the thunderbolt, of the tornado, 
of wreck and of disaster, — the secret of power, of 
ultimate might. 

Japan has her ' magnificent distances.* To intro- 
duce you to an example of the might of some of her 
shapes would be to seat you for a moment on the 
ridge of the Otome-toge pass in the Fujiyama-Hakone 
country, some eighty miles south from Tokyo. From 
an elevation of two or three thousand feet above sea- 
level you may thence look northwards across, as it 
were, a basin, twenty miles from lip to lip. You will 
be conscious of a Presence, almost as men are conscious 
of Death coffined in the midst of them. It is Fuji. 
She opposes your eye as you look northwards from 
the Otome-toge pass, and her opposition scarcely 
brooks other ideas. It is fatal to them. They are 
commanded to be, for the time being, dead. This 
mountain typifies physical Japan ; it has mass, which 
is power ; and form, which is grace. The grace has 
been known ; the power has scarcely been interpreted. 
Fuji is 12,300 odd feet high. This is its mass, its 
power. For its form, as you see it from your perch 
in the pass, it seems absurd to regard it as an accident 
of Nature, so you think and speak of the mountain 
as a work of Art fi-om the hand of Nature. You will 
find, if you care, that the country folk who dwell in 
the shadow do more than this, that they speak of 
* Him ' ; as that ' He ' threw off his mists at ten 
o'clock this forenoon ; that there was a snowstorm 



REVOLUTION HAPPILY IMPOSSIBLE 85 

round ' His ' summit last night ; that ' He ' was very 
handsome all day Thursday of last week. So will you 
think, albeit perhaps you do not speak. You will 
think, beauty being feminine with you : This Lady 
has majesty ; might is upon her brow ; dreams of the 
Infinite are woven with the texture of the chaplet 
she wears ; she is extraordinary, imperial, a queen, a 
goddess. And you will say if you have beheld the 
Infinite in horizons : They do well to hold this 
mountain sacred. For the Japanese have anticipated 
the worship of a world. Fuji long since was apotheo- 
sised among them. 

Here, in fine, is the quality of greatness, of 
splendour, dignity, divinity, to conjure such imperial 
imaginings as mark the borderland of the Infinite. 
And in this sense there are many Fujis in Japan. 
From this very Otome-toge pass if you but face 
southwards you will see, twenty, thirty miles away, 
unfathomable Hakone, serene, silent with awful depth, 
remote as ancient history, dreamful as the future, 
romantic — if you know the national records — stern, 
mysterious, repulsive, sirenian — anything but quaint, 
odd, grotesque. Or come with me to Nara, of all 
Japanese cities the city of that living death, the Past. 
From her sheltering hills you may view the breadth 
and length of Yamato province, cradle of the race of 
the country, burial-place of its C«sars, contempor- 
aries of the Roman Julius and the Macedonian 
Alexander, theatre of its earliest valours, repository 
of its dimmest traditions, place of the first gallantries 
of its first lords and ladies. In this city emperors and 
empresses fondled poets and made vows to priests 
while England was yet a heptarchy, and Norsemen 
and Danes insulted our shores. The somnolent 



86 JAPAN 

chaunting of tonsured priests wanders along its aisles 
of immemorial cedars, as if in search of the echoes of 
the litanies sung here in the year One. There was 
the pomp of courts here in the time of our Venerable 
Bede. And tombs, trees, and temples remain of that 
time and pomp, giving us here the quality of vener- 
able dignity, hoary antiquity. In fine, there are here 
landscapes and groves, meadows and hills, and temple 
courts which are anything but comical — anything but 
quaint, odd, grotesque. 

You may walk scarcely a mile of Japanese country — 
even including its two-thirds proportion of mountains — 
without encountering some oddment of Antiquity, — a 
wayside shrine where palmers of the time of Peter the 
Hermit deprecated the displeasure of the deity of the 
adjacent wood, as do their children's children of the 
twentieth generation to-day ; a mediaeval castle, with 
corner bastions and connecting curtains mirrored in a 
sedgy moat ; the tomb of a hero of the chivalric age ; 
a temple, whose records, if you could read them, would 
transport you to times when Rome was yet an empire, 
if a divided one. 

You find, in fact, that Japan — ^Japanese scenery — has 
a wealth of the dignity which accrues from * associa- 
tions ' and the visible stone and lime, or wooden, 
memorials of Antiquity. It is, in fact, anything but 
quaint — or, at the worst, it is much more than quaint — 
if you behold with true eyes. From Nature it has 
grace, but it has also nobleness ; from the hands of 
men it has quaint roofs, but from history it has infinite 
dignity and that quality of Antiquity which is a kind 
of nobleness. 

The country's weather is a faithful register of 
meteorological extremes. When it rains it always 



REVOLUTION HAPPILY IMPOSSIBLE 87 

pours ; when it shines there is never a cloud in the sky. 
Thus it happens that though two feet more of rain fall 
in Japan per year than in England, Japan has a wealth 
against our poverty of days of sunshine. Japanese 
weather nearly always contrives to be * interesting,' and 
I have an aphorism in two clauses to describe the differ- 
ence betwixt the English climate and the Japanese. It 
is this : In England Summer is never out of the grip of 
Winter ; in Japan Winter is never out of the grip of 
Summer. 

And you shall conclude that the Japanese people 
have received a splendid stage on which to play their 
Tragi-comedy in the drama of modern History ; that 
if Greece had not been great without her Olympus, 
Japan has her more than Olympian Fujisan ; that if the 
Sun be the Mistress of Beauty, Japan should give us 
Grecian gifts ; that if Snow be a fine national discipline, 
or if Imagination love to bask in heat, the people of 
this land should be the Greeks of the age. In short, 
the Japanese can never have a jot or tittle of a case 
against Latitude, as we may have, or the Laplanders. 



XI 

THE SYNTHETIC IN PLEASURES 

Let it not be said that the Japanese in this year of 
their New Age of grace take their pleasures madly as 
the French, with whom they are compared when the 
comparison is not with the British, or the Chinese, or 
the wild men of Borneo. The Japanese theatre party, 
having had early breakfast, goes to the play at lo a.m. 
and may leave at 7 p.m. if the play flags, but at 9 if the 
climax of the drama is artistically managed. The 
party will have lunched or dined, taken afternoon tea 
(for tea purposes the day is ' always afternoon ' in 
Japan) and suppered, the while the drama was unfold- 
ing. Sometimes — such is the manner of some of their 
plays — the party must go home to bed and return at 
the same hour on the morrow and, again provisioned 
for the day, remain to the same hour in the evening if 
it would see and hear the full denouement of the piece. 
Indeed, there are pieces whose concatenate marvels con- 
sume a week of days in the unwinding, and, more 
wonderful still, there are folks in Japan who see them. 
These do not take beds with them to the play, but the 
fact is — the circumstances render the fact obvious — 
provision has to be made and taken by the Japanese 
theatre party for nearly everything except sleep. There 
are rugs and cushions to mitigate the comparative hard- 

88 



THE SYNTHETIC IN PLEASURES 89 

ness and relative uncleanness of the floor mats, which 
are of straw and stuffing ; there will be basketed meals, 
with utensils and flavouring and sauces and spices to 
match ; there will be tobacco and pipes for the elders of 
the party, ladies and gents, and the female servants of 
the house will be there to stop all the little crevices in 
the armour of the party's peace and comfort with the 
sweets of Japanese tendance, which is exquisite. Tea 
in pots at a ha'penny or less a time will be hawked 
throughout the theatre in the entr'actes, with bon-bons 
and bon-mots ; or the fibre of a substantial meal, if 
that be desired. So the party will pass the day and 
part of the night, viewing buskined Tragedy and 
mincing Comedy surrounded by every home comfort. 
Thus may it truly be said that the beauties of the 
national drama are brought home to every Japanese. 
So may it not be said that the nation takes its pleasures 
madly. 

Herein, in fact, as in some other matters of moment, 
Japan has as yet declined to admit that Europe is 
right. In many things the example of Europe has been 
law, but Japan refuses to take her pleasures in a hurry. 
She may go so far as to admit that expedition is desirable 
in business ; she goes further : she attempts to practise 
it there. But in her pleasures the old mode commends 
itself still. She will not have compression ; she will 
not take her happiness in pilules of concentrated strength 
as is our increasing aptitude. She goes to the play at 
10 A.M., and comes away when the shadows of evening 
have lengthened into night. She is fully content to be 
skewered on the spit of a lingering dramatic excitement 
for a week, with intervals for sleep. It all goes to show 
how dear is the art of pleasure, how fundamental the 
habit. ' You may take away our politics, our art, our 



90 JAPAN 

religion ; you may even upset our family order,' Japan 
says, ' but leave us our pleasures ; you shall still permit 
us to take these in our own way. There will else be 
blood.' The national amusement is, it seems, a last 
intrenchment, a last ditch, of the forces of conservatism. 
It is not that Japan is unwilling to be amused in our 
way — the European way. Nor is it that she refuses 
to be interested in our contrivances of entertainment. 
On occasion a far-strolling company of Anglo-Saxon 
players — they come usually from America or Australia — 
tours the Japanese provinces and succeeds well in tick- 
ling the indigenous fancy with the exotic drama ; and 
I have seen Japanese gentlemen hang out the signs of 
enjoyment — they are polite dissimulators it is true — 
during a post-prandial programme of speech and song, 
comic and pathetic, represented or ' sustained ' by 
European amateurs. 

Yet let us not take the Japanese for traitors, who 
lack a single redeeming constancy. I fear it is too true 
that their attachment to the drama — and the pleasures 
at large — of their own soil is as passionate when they 
see the vapidity of what we have to offer them in this 
kind as is ours to our modes when we discover the 
insipidity of that which they would provide for us. 
We shall say, each to each, with all mutual respect, 
' You divert yourselves well and heartily, but your en- 
joyment is infantile and contemptible.' 

There are people who say, in effect, that in Japan 
life itself is one lifelong holiday, and this mayhap is the 
reason why the Japanese go to the play at lo a.m. and 
leave at 9 p.m. Having the span of life to pleasure in 
it is hardly to be expected that the Japanese should take 
their pleasures madly. But then it is not true that Joy 
holds perpetual empire in Japan. Misery hath her 



THE SYNTHETIC IN PLEASURES 91 

alternate dominion there as here ; and hearts are broken 
as easily, though perhaps not so frequently. The 
national drama dresses as many of its figures in the 
habiliments of woe as does ours — though it be a different 
woe — and it is a usual thing for Japanese maids to come 
home from the play and sob their little eyes out from 
sheer sympathy with the sorrows and trials of the play- 
actor hero. 

It comes to this, in fact, that this people in the 
matter of their amusements succeed in this, that they 
make a better bargain with Woe than we do, and this 
because they are willing to compromise matters by 
accepting less than we ask, and by making more of what 
they get when they get it. Such, I am persuaded, is 
the explanation of their undoubtedly more successful 
adoption and application of the hedonistic philosophy, 
though they don't know it by this name. 

Consider their meagre tale of organised Pleasures — 
their theatres where the plays are plays without plots ; 
their excursions to view February plum-trees, April 
cherry blossoms, and autumnal maples and chrysan- 
themums, costing nothing, or a railway fare at a farthing 
a mile ; their festival days, at the price of the day's 
exposure of their fete-day dress, and — well, this is 
practically the list, saving mention of the well-spring of 
joy and content in their hearts, from which they water 
the seeds given them of Pan, reaping a richer harvest 
than we, who make of Pleasure a high and holy business, 
and reap dividends from it, persuaded that these are of 
the currency of Happiness. 

Consider how much they find in the apparent little 
of their plays and their performance. It is so little, it 
seems, that they are fain to supplement the lack of plot 
with junketings as of a family feast, with a dissipation 



92 JAPAN 

of gossip with the friends new or old they will find or 
make in the next ' box.' With us the play is a pleasure 
of selfishness which we mingle, if we can, with the 
pleasure of a purchased conspicuousness in the guinea 
boxes. The play with them induces an accompanying 
ebullition of goodwill and kindliness such as we reserve 
for our bean-feasts and picnics. We demand a play 
with a plot that shall absorb us — ' hold ' us, as it is said, 
' from start to finish.' They ask a sort of dramatic 
accompaniment to the perpetual song of content they 
sing in their heart to the time of its beats. Their play 
is a sort of social meeting, with a murder, a combat a 
outrance^ the penultimate of an amour, a sword dance, 
' happening ' on the stage according to the hour they 
happen to drop in. The murder, the death-combat, 
the amour, the dance, appear on the bill of the play as 
a dramatic unity, but the principle or principles of unity 
are chiefly understood, or taken for granted. Consider 
this precis of the plot of an acted play : — 

There is a famous Bearded Knight of old. He is a 
retainer of the proud and powerful house of Takeda, 
whose forces of the Feudal Era are led by Katsuyori, a 
foolish youth. The generals of the house sacrifice their 
better judgment to their loyalty and agree with much 
foreboding of evil to meet in battle the combined forces 
of Nobunaga and lyeyasu (two leaders of genius in 
Japan's Middle Ages). The Bearded Knight stalks upon 
the scene as this resolution is taken and groans with 
despair. The forces of the house of Takeda are 
defeated and Katsuyori falls upon his sword. In the 
battle the Bearded Knight meets a young warrior, 
Kotaro, of the enemy's side, whom he admonishes to 
refrain from provoking a fight. The foolhardy stripling 
will fight, and the Bearded Knight kills him by accident. 



THE SYNTHETIC IN PLEASURES 93 

The Bearded Knight is then baffled in an attempt to 
assassinate lyeyasu, and is made prisoner. Recounting 
his adventures when captive he chances to tell of the 
fatal scuffle with the lad Kotaro, a sister of whom over- 
hears the narrative of Kotaro's fate. The sister brings 
a dagger to have vengeance of the Bearded Knight for 
her brother's death. The latter explains the accident of 
which he was the victim in killing Kotaro, and with this 
explanation wins the sister's regard, who helps him to 
escape. Tableau ! 

A high-water mark of plot is reached in such other 
warp and woof of Japanese dramatic fancy as this : — 

The hero is one Asahina, and the heroine a beautiful 
lady, Matsushima by name. The latter is a ward of 
honour in the court of the emperor. She is on the 
point of being ' possessed ' by a villain, Tomotoki, when 
Asahina chivalrously rescues her. In recognition of the 
gallantry of Asahina the emperor awards him the lady 
in marriage, and as Asahina had for long been enamoured 
of the maid, he is willing. But the mother of the emperor 
wishes the girl to marry her nephew, who is no other 
than the knave Tomotoki. Unable to offer flat-footed 
opposition to the designs of the Imperial mother the 
maid Matsushima kills herself, leaving a letter of regret 
for the true one,- Asahina. Tableau ! 

Conceive, as you may, that a people imbued with the 
art instinct, ingenious, of a high spirit, quick-witted, 
are content with this for drama, and you will perceive 
that they must be careful economists to succeed so well 
in being so much more happy with what they have 
received — of drama at all events — than we with what 
we have invented. Perhaps this is an inverted view of 
the facts, for, plot or no plot, the Japanese drama is 
always thumpingly transpontine, and most often lavishly 



94 JAPAN 

licentious (but the license is not our license), as indeed 
may be perceived through the synoptical gauze of the 
sketch outlines I have given. The stage is always 
occupied with ' terrible business ' or preparing for it — 
villainy, melee^ suicide, murder, with all their lurid 
properties and appurtenances. The ' time ' is always 
the heroic age of Japan, which is our Queen Bess's era, 
more particularly ; and for ' scene ' the Hamlet has no 
Prince of Denmark that has no battle, or its eve, or its 
morrow. So, for excitements and alarums the Japanese 
playgoer is well enough off. But the sum of the 
matter, the point of the point of view I am stating, is 
this : that he, the Japanese playgoer, need never wait to 
the end of the act — although needless to say his polite- 
ness usually waits — to go out to see a man, as we say. 
The Japanese play is, in fact, clearly an amusement, 
very closely resembling in general effect our own 
variety show. It is never an intellectual effort, never 
an emotional strain, never a didactic in scarlet, never a 
philosophical dissertation, never a preachment on the 
Nemesis of Heredity. Thought is never associated 
with the Japanese drama, still less is conscience, or the 
faculty of ratiocination. The playgoer is amply content 
with amusement for his money. Accordingly he is 
amused, as his forebears have been since Japanese drama 
began, which was with the peep of their History's 
dawn. 

It is largely so with the other pleasures of this 
people. Yet if they do not engage their intellect to 
minister to their pleasures, as we try to do, they have 
trained the negative faculty of intellection, so to speak, 
to be handmaiden to their enjoyments. I mean that 
the Japanese contemplate more and so much more 
successfully than we do. If we know or have learned 



THE SYNTHETIC IN PLEASURES 95 

how to brew the intoxication of unrest, they know or 
have learned where to find and how to sip the honey 
of peace. The art of Contemplation is long since dead 
with us. In Japan it is still the crown of all pleasures. 
And where they win upon us is in the inexpensive- 
ness, physical and psychical, of this manner of pleasure. 
There is no wear and tear of mind, soul, conscience, 
spirit, from their drama, and their contemplation of 
plum-buds, cherry blossoms, maple leaves, and chrysan- 
themum gardens costs no more, as I have said, than a 
halfpenny per mile or less on the railway. I would 
have Europe and America — the latter as soon as 
possible — go to school in the art of Contemplation 
with a Japanese sakura-no- hana (meaning cherry- 
blossom) party. They will dress them in the taste- 
fullest of tints : the father in the black or drab or 
coffee-brown of dignity ; the mother in the silver-grey 
of conspicuous modesty ; the children in the motley 
pink and red and white and blue and saffron of that 
which exists to please. The April sky will bear on its 
sapphire concavity here and there a frosty breathing of 
cirrus, pale primrose scrolls, carnation volutes and 
angels' wings of diaphanous gold. The air will be 
tepid with the warmth which has enticed the lately 
prisoned buds into coquettish bloom. The party will 
walk or train to the ' viewing,' merrily and with 
laughing greeting for all the world, even for the 
foreigner with his discordant dress and unlovely red 
hair. The mind of the party from the time of its 
setting out is an increasing calm, a preparatory fast, a 
smoothing of the way for the coming of the cherub Con- 
templation. And the cherub will duly give his votaries 
welcome at the limits of the cherry grove, avenue, park, 
which in the distance is a conflagration in pink without 



96 JAPAN 

smoke. Within the sweet, odorous umbrage of a 
blossom Wonder which may not be described the party 
will give possession to the cherub. They will, in fact, 
contemplate — walking, sitting, eating, drinking, even 
dancing, as if to test the fittest sensation to accompany 
the cherubic possession. They will be units in a 
thousand, two thousand, three, four thousand, five, 
who also all are contemplating. It may be morning, 
it may be afternoon, it may be evening — it is probably 
evening. The moon may appear before the party's 
going, and the stranger may dream that he has entered 
the Elysian fields. He does not dream that the small, 
quiet Japanese gentleman in black, scuffling at his side, 
the ecstasy of his features obscured by the double 
twilight under the tree-flowers, is there in verity. So 
might I write, more so might I write, of the ' viewing ' 
of the maple leaves in Autumn, when Contemplation, 
now become Worship, shall have flown to a hillside or a 
hollow of trees foliaged in tints from blood-red through 
all the intermediate shades to the yellow of old gold. 

You perceive what these people accomplish in the 
economy of Pleasure ? Their lusty youth, it may be 
admitted, now find enjoyment in sport imported by the 
Revolution — in baseball, in cycling, in lawn -tennis. 
The ladies ten, fifteen, years ago bought our ball dresses 
and went to balls to dance, but now they wear their 
own grace in silks again, with which they come to look 
on and to adorn. The native taste in pleasure, despite 
these signs, is deep-rooted in its own origins, and 
revolution has scarcely shaken it. Nor will it for long, 
perhaps for ever. 

Let us be just. Let us admit that of two secrets, 
two phases of the doctrine of hedonism, the Japanese 
know one, and we the other. To them is the pleasure 



THE SYNTHETIC IN PLEASURES 97 

of synthesis, to us the pleasure of analysis. Ours is 
the fierce joy of strife ; theirs the calm content of 
concord. We rejoice in examination, they in con- 
templation. We are subjective, they objective. And 
the vital moral of the story is this, that if the subjective 
— analysis — stimulate that which is already strong, it 
weakens that which is already weak ; whereas, is not 
the objective in pleasure — the art of contemplation — 
synthesis — always constructive ? So you find everybody 
in Japan, under ordinary conditions, happy, and nobody 
the worse of his happiness. You look in vain for a 
workhouse in the land. There is an equal distribution, 
a fair sharing, of the riches of happiness. With us 
there are appalling extremes. With us half who drink 
from the cup are poisoned. Hence doubtless arose the 
saying that we take our pleasures sadly. 



H 



XII 

PARTING OF THE WAYS 

More than once while you are in Japan you may ask 
yourself if there has been any Revolution, whether any 
is in progress. Repetition of the question depends 
upon the length of your stay and the scope and 
direction of your study of the Revolution. There are 
also questions of temperament, of the history sense, of 
the capacity for generalisations ; and there is the 
verdict of personal experience. This last is often 
predominant in the note and tone of a general estimate. 
What all of us lack is the Japanese point of view ; or, 
if you like, the Asiatic, the Oriental consciousness. 
This we lack, and must lack because, it seems, there 
are differences in the fundamentals of being. To 
estimate the Revolution justly it is necessary to be two 
persons, to be a dual personality, to be derived of two 
races, and yet not to be a cross, or mixture, of both. 
The Oriental consciousness is necessary in its wholeness, 
with the European ancestry which you, I, already 
possess. 

So the question which more than once you put to 
yourself about the state of affairs in Japan while you 
are there is only half a question. Half of it is lack of 
the Oriental, the Japanese consciousness. When you 
supply this lack of the Japanese consciousness with . 

98 



PARTING OF THE WAYS 99 

some knowledge of Japanese history, the question, 
though it may still on occasion rise to your lips, usually 
remains there. Your lips keep it ; they lock upon it ; 
and you put it away back in the secret repositories of 
your European ancestry, where it moves fitfully, like 
the unborn child, as the grand masque of the Revolution 
moves before your eyes. 

A great man — a great spirit — of Japan's Revolution, 
dead two years ago, used to tell a story which is an 
epitome of the Japanese achievement. When he was 
a young man and a two-sworded samurai of the 
Feudal Age, he made a journey into the country. 
In his journey he met a farmer who, upon the instant 
of his observing the samurai, jumped from the horse 
he was riding. ' Why do you do this .? ' the other 
asked. ' I only wish to be pardoned,' the farmer 
said. ' For what ? ' asked the other again. ' Is this 
not your own horse ? ' * Yes, sir.' ' What harm is 
there, then, in riding upon it .? Mount it again im- 
mediately.' But it was only upon threat of a sword- 
thrust that the feudal farmer consented to mount in 
the feudal samurai's presence. 

This ' Then ' of the Japan of four decades ago, 
opposed to the * Now ' of your visit in 1 904, is a 
descriptive antithesis which is also a fair epitome, a 
good bird's-eye view, of the Japanese achievement. 
Lacking the Japanese consciousness you, if you would 
realise the miracle of Japan's Modern Era, should but 
have lived under Japan's Feudal Era, thirty-five years 
ago or so. 

There is a deceiving face of things in Japan. The 
land is a land of deceptions, and one of the subtlest, 
perhaps because it is one that is least intended, is 
its mask of manners and customs. You land at 



loo JAPAN 

Yokohama and you gravely note that babies are still 
carried pickaback, perhaps on the very quay of your 
first landing. You stroll into the native town, and 
in your first glimpse of Japanese interiors you observe 
that the race still squats tailor-fashion on the floor to 
its meals, or upon its heels, frog-fashion, when in a 
leisure evening hour it would contemplate the pageant 
of the street from the flagstones of its own threshold. 
With the adventurous spirit of the explorer you give 
a share of your first rich, eager hours to a tea-house, 
where, if you 'touch' the 'real thing' — not easily 
possible, indeed, in Yokohama — you find that the 
Japanese race still furnishes its sitting and dining- 
rooms most charmingly with nothing ; that the walls 
are still chiefly paper and the floor the only table. In 
Yokohama, indeed, you may not know how easily you 
are recognised for a stranger, nor with how smooth 
and innocent a relish you are taken in at your first 
tea-house, and by your first, second, and third jinrikisha- 
man. And even did you know so much, it is doubtful 
if you should jot the facts down in opposition or by 
way of counterpoise to the pickaback infant and the 
paper walls. It is debatable if they be not of the 
same category as evidence. You may scarcely at once 
put it down so — 'Against the aboriginal habit of 
sitting upon the heels I note a European proficiency 
in the art of fleecing the stranger.' It is not yet 
time — you do not yet know enough — to decide that 
the art is certain evidence of the progress of modern 
ideas, and the habit an instance of the immobility of the 
former things. 

You go on ; you add to your observations. You 
go to Tokyo, and though mayhap you visit a Cabinet 
Minister in the palatial house of the Department of 



PARTING OF THE WAYS loi 

Commerce and Agriculture, and from him and the 
palace of his Department receive an illuminative 
impression of the reality of the Revolution, there is 
a crowded procession of deceiving appearances — the 
mask of manners and customs. You visit your 
Japanese friend in his home, and you see and hear 
about the Japanese wife. You dig in the subsoil of 
the popular Idea, and you strike an underground 
system of astrologic and necromantic shelters to which, 
upon domestic crises, the people still retreat as by 
instinct of a fearful faith. You visit ancient temples 
and behold them alive and quivering with the throb 
of the convulsive prayer of a thousand believers per day. 
- You note the permanence of the people's ancient 
habits of pleasure, you mingle with the crowds of a 
festival which has a history of a thousand years, which 
has its hundred thousand prototype feasts throughout 
the land, served by a hundred thousand dedicated 
priests who hold in leash the prodigious power of a 
hundred thousand gods and goblins. 

You will find, as your investigations proceed, that 
the country, the people, are loyal even to their ancient 
vices. The widespread fame of the Yoshiwara will 
have reached you long before you land at Yokohama. 
If not before, you will sniff its disgusting fragrance in 
the oily aroma of the first engineer's first chat on your 
Japan -bound steamer. Colloguing with the initiated 
in the first week of your Japanese visit, you hear much 
about the Yoshiwara ; so much that, without judgment, 
you might imagine that Japan is chiefly Yoshiwara ; 
that the Yoshiwara is Japan. Of course it isn't so ; 
nothing is at bottom less true than the fool-story about 
the Japanese Yoshiwara that has been bruited to the 
ends of the earth ; the story that it is Japan, that 



102 . JAPAN 

Japan is the Yoshiwara. All that need be said about 
it is that it ranks, or appears to rank, in point of 
immobility, with the Japanese temple festival. You 
will find it so. It is part of the mask of manners 
and customs. To-day, to-night, the * quarter ' in 
Tokyo and most of the great cities is as brilliantly 
illuminated, as garishly gilded, as gorgeously attired, as 
cunningly rouged, as pretty, as picturesque, almost as 
profitable, as ever. Its vice to-day is often as virtuous 
as of old, its dividends — it is often a company concern 
— as atrocious an insult to the body and soul of 
Woman as the assignations of Tottenham Court 
Road. ' Tragedies of the Yoshiwara ' are a common 
chronicle of the twentieth-century newspapers of Japan, 
even as they are the commonest theme of Japanese 
romantic literature and drama of the old era. To-day 
a daughter enters the Yoshiwara to give her father 
bread, or perad venture to keep her widowed mother 
from penury. The fabric of this institution of hideous 
vice is often, as of old, raised upon a foundation of 
heroic virtue ; divine sacrifice is often here linked as 
of old to a form of selfishness which must be the moral 
law of hell. Just the other day the sublime victim was 
still a slave, whose hope of freedom was her loss of 
the power to attract ; but the Revolution yesterday 
decided that in Tokyo, at least, she is entitled by law 
to walk off with her own body when she pleases — to 
leave the quarter, that is.^ 

Well, it is the mask of ancient manners and customs, 
and, if you will, of vices. As such it is a deception. 
You are deceived if you conclude from it that there 
has been no Revolution ; that there is no Revolution in 

^ This, let it be said to its honour, has been achieved mainly through the 
boisterous but effective instrumentality of the Salvation Army in Japan. 



PARTING OF THE WAYS 103 

progress to-day. Read my story of the feudal farmer 
and the feudal samurai of thirty-five years ago. It is a 
first lesson in the Revolution, elementary, easily grasped, 
and strictly true. Daimyo, name of terror and of the 
wielder of powers of life and death in the Japan of 1 870, 
is in these days a synonym for ' fool ' in the mouths of 
the people, and he has, of course, utterly disappeared. 
This also is a simple, graphic object-lesson. There is 
no Daimyo, even by name ; there are no samurai, save 
when the ancestry of some highly-placed official is in 
question. They disappeared when the Feudal Age was 
closed by Imperial Decree in 1871. You think this is 
but little, you in England, where Feudalism still hunts 
foxes, carries elections, and proscribes faiths ! Japan, 
in truth, is at a further remove from the Feudal Age 
than England. This is the Revolution, accomplishing 
in thirty years more than British progress in three 
hundred ! Is there not, then, a Revolution .'' 

The truth is, the mask of old manners and customs 
and vices which Japan, the Revolution, wears is one of 
the subtle deceptions of a land of deceptions — some of 
them, as this one, unconscious, unintended deceptions. 
Judge of the land and its people by its salutations, by 
its house furniture, its gods of the hearth, its love- 
making, its prayers, its tales of mean streets ; judge of 
it so, and there is no New Age in Japan, no Upheaval, 
no sacred Revolution. 

But then look higher, look farther, look wider, and 
also ask yourself if a revolution of manners and customs, 
or even of vices, be absolutely necessary. 

Look back thirty years and see the Feudal Age, 
when a man was a piece of goods or an animal ; look 
around in the Japan of to-day and see him a man, or 
getting to be one. 



I04 JAPAN 

The Revolution is nothing Hke complete, howsoever 
you look at it, and it may be that a large revision of 
manners and vices is part of its proper work. Yet 
already it has recorded radiant, admirable achievements 
which the seeming — it is often seeming — immobility of 
the daily habit of the people hides, for your deception. 
It has, as I say, made of a piece of goods a man, or at 
the worst a manikin. Is this not much.? Is it less 
than the creation of a soul, a miracle namely, for that 
this, among us, is a supernatural achievement, the work 
of God ? It is no less, I think. 

Let us agree that the great work is only half com- 
plete, or less. Let us agree if only because the Japanese 
Emperor says so. In a Rescript of a few months back, 
addressed to Marquis Ito upon a grave affair, the 
Japanese Emperor says, * The work consequent on the 
Restoration has been carried half-way towards com- 
pletion, but the end is still far distant.' I will put it 
differently, yet perhaps similarly : ' Japan's Revolution 
has made of a piece of goods a man ; of a toy it has 
not yet made a woman.' It is a mode of expression, 
my mode, not the Japanese Emperor's, which, however, 
is much to the same effect. 

With greater license of rhetoric I would say that 
behind the mask of ancient manners there is a nation 
of the East, a race of Asia, whose eyes, while they but 
yesterday, historically speaking, looked towards the 
dark and death, to-day lift upon the light and life. It 
is a change of direction that has taken place ; it is a 
new course that is steered. The former way was the 
path of destruction ; the new is the way of life. 

For the Revolution, having made the man, has to 
feed and nurture him as a man ; there is a new chart 
needed for the new seas, the new coasts, towards which 



PARTING OF THE WAYS 105 

the new course lies. There is a reorganised, a re- 
created Educational System, with Science for a soul ; 
there is Modern Industry and Commerce, formerly 
contemptible or non-existent, now the foundation of 
the State ; there is a shape of Representative Govern- 
ment, Parliamentary Institutions, the highest, the 
supreme attempt of the Revolution, and therefore — the 
end being yet * far distant ' — its least successful, some- 
times most amusing attempt. 

Of this — the food of the man of the Revolution, 
late chattel of the Feudal Age, the house of his new- 
born soul — some part is great, some part ludicrous, 
some part merely foolish. It hardly possesses all the 
interest of the mask of manners. Stupendous issues, 
nevertheless, turn upon its future, rendering it almost, 
I think, a concern of Mankind. 



XIII 

IN THE MACHINE SHOP 

An American of my acquaintance, who has done rather 
big things in a great industry in his own country, who 
knows what's what in the science of applied mechanics, 
and can rebuke a turner in an engineering shop for 
taking his eyes off his lathe when he oughtn't, came to 
Japan expecting, he confessed to me, to find a people 
whose inborn faculty for making things, and ability to 
make them at a prime cost to give United States 
employers ' fits,' prophesied the day of their early 
appearance upon the world's stage as a producing and 
manufacturing competitor of the New World — and of 
the Old, had not the Old, in my friend's view, already 
been kicked off the stage by the New. My friend 
beheld the new Yellow Peril — the Peril with a chisel 
for a sword, and a steam-hammer for a forty-pounder. 
' They eat rice,' said he, ' and if they can turn 
shafting and forge cranks on rice, guess they'll beat 
us and the rest.' 

This gentleman from Indiana spent six or eight 
months in the country, saw a big job through a 
Japanese engineering shop, sized up with keen grey 
eyes the men who put it through, and pottered about 
among the fitters, turners, moulders, draughtsmen, 

io6 



IN THE MACHINE SHOP 107 

Wrights, and rouseabouts the while he was seeing the 
job through. At the end he left Japan with a serene 
mind ; he was even happy. The Peril had gone 
away ; disappeared ; a substantial fear had become a 
thing to laugh at. ' Yep,' said the American, ' Japan 
may compete with the United States as a manufacturer 
in two hundred years, but you don't find me worrying 
'bout that.' He would go into all the minutise of 
the case and marshal reasons. He was a convinced 
man. 

It is quite true — are we of Great Britain to say 
fortunately or unfortunately ? We are the political 
allies of this people, and we must desire to see them 
competent in the arts and contrivings which are the 
strength and the excuse of politics. But our markets — we 
lose them and we lose ourselves. On the other hand, 
there may always be enough for all, for all time. 

Whatever we may believe in Europe, by reason of 
the fairy-books that have been written about Japan, 
this people has not been transformed in a generation. 
Especially has it not been transformed into a people of 
genius in those European arts and industries of which 
steam and steel are the primaries. 

With the same American I have quoted I walked 
in a Japanese machine-shop where fittings and equip- 
ments were of later pattern and build than would be 
found in most shipbuilding yards — it was a ship- 
building firm's place — in England. ' See that over- 
head crane,' he said, * they don't know 'nough to give 
it a move along to the other end occasionally ; it's 
going to scrap quick. This planer wants to be taken 
down and medically examined ; they've been doing the 
oiling all wrong.' This, possibly, should be the first 
count of the indictment against Japanese methods in 



io8 JAPAN 

the workshops where they are hoping to make them- 
selves a manufacturing people — this, that the best of 
their workmen can't or won't treat tools and machinery 
kindly. You may conjecture that it is because they 
have not been taught, but the Occidental expert teUs 
you it is because they have not the heart, the bias, the 
bent of the true Western mechanic — the mechanic who 
believes in himself and his tools, who was born that 
way of a people who have created the things which 
have steam and life to them. It meets you in all 
Japanese cities which are being modernised — this in- 
capacity to serve the need of small things which are the 
component parts of great things, carrying the empire of 
the industrial world. They are ready — nay, they are 
always anxious, if they are able — to buy the newest 
combination, hot from the brain of the inventor, but 
they are inexpert, even after much teaching, in seducing 
the best work from it when they have it, and in cherish- 
ing and caring for it to its best and ultimate uses. Any 
of the Europeans and Americans whom — even to-day 
when, with some justification, Japan's pride in achieve- 
ment grows big — they pay to use their imported 
machines with tenderness, will notch many fingers 
before his tale of examples of this kind is told to you. 

Take the most glaring example — their abuse of 
business offices built in the ' foreign,' that is, pre- 
sumably, the European style. The municipal offices in 
the large towns, the offices of the railway companies 
and the newspapers, the Custom Houses, many factory 
offices. Chambers of Commerce in important cities — 
these are run up in the ' foreign ' style — foreign with 
reference, that is, to their architecture, what they have 
of it, and their interior arrangement. As to the usage 
they get, it is foreign to anything known in Europe — 



IN THE MACHINE SHOP 109 

in England at any rate — away from the cargo sheds on 
our wharves. The walls, usually of stucco, are more 
delightfully hideous than all the rest, if that be possible. 
To explain them you might think of petroleum lamps 
with broken chimneys left in the rooms and corridors 
for three days and three nights to impart the ground 
tint while the stucco dried. Subsequently a squad of 
industrious lads came with garden rakes, fitted with 
charcoal teeth, to go up and down the walls to their 
arm's reach. Then a breed of healthy spiders took 
possession. Thus simply and inexpensively you pro- 
cure the field of soot and grime, and the Greek 
patterns in black, which amuse more than they disturb 
you in the reception rooms of the chief offices of the 
leading Japanese railway companies — in Tokyo, Yoko- 
hama, Osaka, and elsewhere. Next the floor you will 
find the skirting board shredded ; and in the ceiling 
the tuppeny mouldings have lost sections and flourishes, 
and the window panes may have been clean when the 
glazier left off^. The same thing holds from their 
abuse of a three -storied European fabric, to their 
neglect of a typewriter — with the exceptions limited 
to the best class of banks and to machines that can't 
come by harm from neglect. In the broad aspect of it 
you soon come to think that the Occidental experts are 
right ; you suspect that the Japanese do not possess 
the soul or the heart for European tools, or that they 
have not yet acquired it. 

This is one count in the case against the Japanese 
as workers and artificers in European machine-shops, 
as wielders of the industrial weapons of the new civilisa- 
tion they adopted a generation ago. Then there is the 
Japanese product of the machines and the tools they 
do not yet love as they should. Here also the facts — 



no JAPAN 

all this, to be sure, is written rigidly of the present, not 
of the future — are unattractive. 

The resident Europeans in Japan have a phrase. 
The handle of the umbrella they bought last week 
breaks away. ' It's Japanese,' they say. This explains 
everything. The watch they had repaired yesterday 
stops in the night. ' Japanese work,' they say. This 
also explains everything, 

I met a Bradford traveller in one of Japan's former 
capitals — Japan is the greatest country in the world for 
former capitals, whereby, to be sure, it loses nothing in 
the quality of romance. The Bradford man was a 
traveller in spinning and weaving accessories, especially 
bobbins. ' The Japanese mill-owners,' he said to me, 
* would be very glad to be able to do without foreign- 
made bobbins. They tell me frankly that they want 
to encourage the native makers, and that they take as 
much as possible of the native-made article. But I do 
lots of business with them notwithstanding. They say 
they can't depend on the uniformity and the durability 
of the Japanese bobbin, and they're sorry for it.' 

You hear it said that Japanese dentists are clever ; 
but the cement they use comes away in a month, and 
the pin of the crown they put on the stump of your 
eye-tooth may snap on a biscuit. They may be clever, 
but their work somehow doesn't stand. They may 
know how to do it, but tliey don't do it, and after- 
wards you pay through the nose to the American 
dentist in Yokohama for work that will hold until you 
have no further use for your molars. 

Japanese glass-making is a great business, but you 
lose a lamp-chimney once a week if you remember that 
they are Japanese made, and one once in three days if 
you forget. They make screw-nails too, but unless 



IN THE MACHINE SHOP iii 

you are a careful buyer you may get a large proportion 
with the grooves on the head away from the centre. 
On a big scale there is the affaire — one of the affaires 
— of the Government Steel Foundry, started over two 
years ago. The Foundry undertook a home contract 
in steel rails. The time limit was far exceeded ; and 
when the rails were examined and tested, even if the 
inspectors were authorised to adopt a much lower 
standard for quality than is required for rails from 
abroad, the Foundry's rails didn't pass, and another 
order was placed abroad. 

A German gentleman in Yokohama, of wide know- 
ledge and wider experience, said to me of part of his 
twenty years* observation of the Japanese : ' I've tried 
every class of tradesmen, and I have never found one 
who knew his work — the trade he professed to follow. 
They need the German or English apprenticeship 
system.' And he told me how he himself had accom- 
plished his ' masterpiece ' in his young trade of ship- 
wright in the old German days of his youth. 

We have it, then, that Japan scarcely yet knows 
how to use well the fibre and the sinew of the machines 
she buys from the foreigner, in the hope of producing 
what the foreigner at present sells to her. Further, 
that the things that come from the machines and the 
tools, as the Japanese mechanic uses them, are not of 
the class of the European or American article. That 
is, the Japanese industrial unit has not inspired the soul 
of modern (European) mechanics, and does not yet 
know fully the art that is in their application. 

Always remember that this is written rigidly of the 
present. There is the future. That may be great 
enough even upon the signs already given. Japanese 
shipbuilding yards will now turn you out a steamer of 



112 JAPAN 

as many thousand tons' burthen as you wish, with time 
allowed them to order steel plates from Europe. They 
build locomotives — one only perhaps where they import 
a hundred — and even if pistons and journals and cylin- 
ders and some of the vital rods are imported, the 
foundation has been laid. And, of course, the Japanese 
of these revolutionary times will attempt anything, one 
secret of their shortcoming being perhaps that they 
often stop short at attempting, or at a successful first 
attempt. Most of their achievements in imported indus- 
tries are attempts. These, certainly, are the beginning 
of deeds, but it doesn't do to move in a circle of 
attempts. 

This discussion does not touch Japan's native, her 
indigenous industries. There is much pertinence in 
this way of putting it to the foreign expert who scoffs 
at Japanese attempts in steel-rolling : ' Put the wives 
of the peasantry of Europe to embroidering a screen as 
these child-bearing Japanese women do it. Put a selec- 
tion of boys from an English Board School to making 
the filigree of the stork, or the chrysanthemum on this 
cloisonne vase, and require them in a reasonable time 
to apply the pigments to the same, with this Japanese 
urchin's deftness. How will our peasant women and 
our Board School boys succeed ? ' Indifferently, without 
doubt — if they ever even finish an attempt, as the 
Japanese are finishing attempts in almost every art and 
manufacture known in the Occident, the while they 
retain and improve for improving times the arts and 
manufactures which are the expression of the civilisation 
they did not import. 

When you go to Japan examine the Commercial 
Museums in Tokyo and Osaka — the stands of Japanese 
specimens. You will find that in a single generation 



IN THE MACHINE SHOP 113 

everything of ours, from test-tubes and cameras to 
phaetons and steam-engines, has been turned out in 
Japanese workshops. These are the attempts, and it 
is quite possible that their promise is sure. True, the 
fulfilment of the promise may only be in the two 
hundred years of my American, or when the mechanical 
genius has been bred into this people by the law and 
the prophecies of Heredity. 



XIV 
THE MERCHANT AND HIS MORALS 

Before you are long in Japan you find that there is one 
judge, or group of judges — or are they judges ? — whose 
opinion of the Japanese is absolute and unchanging. 
This judge is the commercial foreigner resident in 
Japan. His opinion is absolute and unchanging, and 
wholly bad, because, he says, it is impossible to tell 
beforehand whether the Japanese merchant will take 
delivery — that is, will consider the market favourable 
enough to permit him to fulfil his bargain. 

This is not a new question, and the judicial mind, 
with the facts before it, usually concludes that the 
Japanese merchant is not libelled. Often, indeed, he 
may fairly be said to be about as bad as he is called. 
What should be said which is not usually said by the 
foreign critic, is that the Japanese merchant makes a 
prey of his own kind as readily as of the alien sheep. 
It is not a question so much of the Japanese merchant's 
view of the sanctity of his bond with the foreign 
merchant, as of the code of ethics ruling throughout 
the commercial and business system of the Japan of the 
Revolution. It is a question whether there is such a 
code ; whether the Japanese merchant has commercial 
morals, not whether he knows and feels it be a wrong 
thing to ignore his obligations under a contract with a 
foreign importer. 

114 



THE MERCHANT AND HIS MORALS 115 

The facts are indisputable. The Japanese merchant, 
you will suppose, sees a market for soft goods six 
months hence. The foreign importer takes his order 
— 100 cases, pattern, texture, quality, as specified or 
according to sample. In the fulness of time the goods 
are to hand from Bradford. But the market for soft 
goods has fallen a point or two. The Japanese merchant 
perceives that he cannot put the goods on the market — 
in other words, that he cannot abide by his contract — 
at a profit. It is therefore impossible for him to take 
delivery, for he would do so at a loss. So he or his 
emissaries observe very blandly, and with innocence 
written on their intention for all men to see, that the 
selvedge of this flannelling is not quite of the width of 
sample ; that there is .01 per cent more cotton in this 
serge than there should be ; that the texture of these 
rugs runs diagonally instead of laterally — that, in short, 
acceptance of delivery is impossible because the goods 
are not in accordance with sample — that is to say, ' The 
market is bad and I cannot sell at a profit.' If the 
goods are in scrupulous accord with sample, then they 
are a week late in arrival — that is to say, ' I cannot 
sell at a profit.' If the goods are up to time, and tally 
indisputably with sample, your Japanese merchant says, 
' Give me time ' — that is to say, * Wait until I can sell 
at a profit.' And the foreign merchant waits, his capital 
to the extent of the goods locked up, until a loss is 
added to his banking account. 

* You should appeal to the Courts,' says the foreign 
merchant's friend just off the sea. * Appeal to the 
Courts, my dear sir .? I will do that and I will shut up 

shop to-morrow. Have yr)u heard of the case ? 

The Japanese knew the art of boycott before Captain 
Boycott was born. No, old chap, I will appeal to the 



ii6 JAPAN 

Courts, and I will book my passage home. What's more, 
the Japanese merchant goes in at one door of the Bank- 
ruptcy Court and out at the other, as he would walk 
from his front door to his backyard to see the sunset.' 

Well, there is the broad consideration that this is 
a question touching the principles upon which the 
Japanese commercial fabric is built, the conventional 
moralities which hold it together. But as to the 
pother in which the foreign merchant finds himself 
involved by it there are one or two incidental things 
to say. 

The foreign merchant says he would make more 
money — not, perhaps, meaning enough — if the Japanese 
merchant always stood to his bargain. The truth, how- 
ever, is that it is at present rather a clear case of 'twixt 
the devil and the deep sea for him. Let the foreign 
merchant hold the Japanese to his bond, and the latter, 
if he cannot bulldose by boycott, will seek the secure 
haven of the Bankruptcy Court, where he pays nothing 
in the pound with a smile. It is six and half a dozen 
in the present state of the finances and the morals of 
the Japanese merchant. If he were commercially 
virtuous the Japanese merchant wouldn't contract to 
buy, having no money. As he contracts to buy, it is 
not in his power to be commercially virtuous. For the 
Japanese merchant is a poor man, and, in justice let it 
be said, the foreign merchant usually knows that he 
is a poor man. For himself, at least, the Japanese 
merchant thinks it is enough if, as a poor man, he 
promises as much as a rich one. He thinks it is too 
much to expect him to redeem his promises on the 
same scale. ' I will promise — or contract — as big as 
you like,' says he, ' but it is absurd to expect me to do 
as big as I promise.' One might say the craze for 



THE MERCHANT AND HIS MORALS 117 

specialism has invaded the merchant class of Japan. 
The Japanese merchant is a specialist in promises, and 
his proficiency is great, probably because he keeps him- 
self strictly to his groove — to his speciality. 

To the foreign merchant this will seem to be trifling 

with a serious question — the most serious question, he 

will say, in the commercial relations, perhaps in the 

total relations, of Japan with the world. Nevertheless, 

it is almost certain that the Japanese merchant would, 

as a rule, be a much more honest and honourable trader 

if he were able. Indeed, it is not going too far to say 

in laudation of his virtues, that he would be glad to be 

able to be honest ; for this is no more than saying that 

he would be glad to be rich, to have a substantial 

working capital, to have credit with the banks, to be 

a respectable member of society. At present he is 

poor ; he works — or speculates — from transaction to 

transaction ; he has no credit ; it is doubtful if he is 

a respectable member of Japanese society. He is, to 

be sure, going the wrong way about establishing his 

credit and raising himself in the social scale by his 

conduct under contracts with the foreign importers, 

who speak about his shocking behaviour to all the 

world. But here the larger question enters : the 

Japanese merchant's very ignorance of the rightness 

of the right way, the morality of the moral, about the 

success of honesty as the best policy, suggests that 

which is perhaps as near the truth as you may get, 

this namely, that his carelessness about his bargain with 

the foreign merchant is not a separate or distinct sin, 

but merely a symptom. It is the symptom of a 

disease ; it is an outcrop at a particular point of a vein 

of inferior ore in the Japanese character — the character, 

at any rate, of the trading-class of the country. 



ii8 JAPAN 

Consider Japanese firms in competition for home 
contracts. One of many narratives of fact coming to 
me concerns a Government contract. A certain firm 
A,, which proposed to tender for the contract, knew 
that a rival concern B. would also compete. A. sent 
its agents by roundabout ways to encompass the post- 
ponement of the despatch of B.'s tender until near the 
time for opening the tenders. On the final day B.'s 
representatives left for Tokyo to lodge the firm's 
tender. A.'s agents followed, forgathered with B.'s 
representatives, and plied and befuddled them with 
drink at a tea-house until the Government office had 
closed and the lodgment of offers was no longer pos- 
sible. It is quite probable that B. countermined by 
sending its men to get a glimpse of A.'s figures through 
the brick wall of the Government office, and by ante- 
dating a lower offisr, and winking the other eye to the 
arbiter, walked away with the contract. This is not 
unusual in Japan. It is smart, a ' great scheme,' as the 
Americans say, a tonic to one's reputation in the market- 
place. 

Then if one can imitate a popular label without 
actually infringing a copyright, it is very good business 
in Japan. British soap-makers, condensed-milk makers 
and preserve manufacturers, Swedish match-makers and 
German clock-makers, might rub their eyes at sight of 
their labels and names and trademarks on the stalls 
of Japanese and Chinese cheap jacks. The Japanese 
manufacturer procures a sample of their wares, and 
goes home to make a life-like supply for the Japanese 
and Chinese markets, which do not know any better 
and would not care if they did. 

When you trade with the Japanese merchant you 
must not establish a cardinal principle of testing every 



THE MERCHANT AND HIS MORALS 119 

consignment of his goods by examination of one parcel 
in every fifty. Nor should you make a practice of 
testing one in a score. ' Old chap,' says your com- 
patriot, the English merchant in Japan, after tiffin, 
' I can never be satisfied that I have the stuff I ordered 
until I have seen the lot of it to the last of it. I find 
nineteen cases as they should be, but 1 do not, therefore, 
assume that the twentieth need not be turned out.' 
Your cardinal principle in trade with the Japanese 
merchant, in the present state of his morals, is to test 
fifty parcels in fifty. 

A year or so ago one of the Japanese Banks of the 
second rank — so considerable an institution as to be 
nearly of first rank — attempted to repudiate its obliga- 
tion to a foreign Bank to the tune of ^^ 13,000, an 
obligation assumed, for a consideration, by an endorse- 
ment of the note of a third party, the excuse offered 
for the repudiation being that the business was trans- 
acted by a branch manager, for whose acts the Bank 
denied responsibility ! 

It is true — and the enlightened men of the land 
neither deny nor seek to palliate the facts — a great deal 
of oblique tortuous practice and large amounts of 
unclean money are needful to the easy working of the 
little wheels and the big wheels of Japan's present-day 
commercial machine. 

The country has its financial backbone — a strong 
backbone — in its Banks of the first rank, which in 
their management and conduct are beyond the cavil of 
shareholders or of the hypercritical foreign observer. 
Below this, however, there is something of a commercial 
chaos, as below the governing class there is something 
of a political chaos among the people — or a chaos of 
political notions. 



I20 JAPAN 

As to the remedy, all the enlightened men of the 
land say in chorus, ' Education, Education, Education.' 
This means that the evil has roots, that it is not inci- 
dental to the Japanese merchant's traffic with the foreign 
buyer and seller ; that it is in the hone ; that it is a 
tradition, a heritage ; that it is darkness where light 
should be. 

An important member of the Japanese judiciary, 
sitting in one of the Yokohama courts, recently 
furnished to an English newspaper there his exposition 
of the true inwardness of the facts with a prescribed 
prophyliictic. His exposition is at least interesting, 
and probably as skilful a shot at the truth as may 
be achieved. The judge thinks that a confusion and 
anarchy of commercial morals has resulted from the 
upheaval of old ideas and customs — the Revolution — 
which began with the opening of Japan to the world 
and still continues. This enlightened judge then says : 
* From a purely materialistic point of view the Japanese 
have absorbed more or less all European civilisation, 
but at the same time the process is superficial, and it 
cannot truly be said that the nation as a whole has ab- 
sorbed it, or that they are all civilised from a European 
point of view. There is a void somewhere ; that void 
will have to be supplied by the idealism of the West, 
which has been entirely ignored by Japan, while the 
materialism has been successfully assimilated. ... It 
therefore seems to me that if we take in the material 
civilisation of Europe we must also take in to counter- 
balance it the idealism and spiritual soul, as it were, of 
Occidental enlightenment. The course of tuition will 
take place gradually. The merchants, if they persist 
in their present practices, will inevitably lose their 
clients, and it will begin to dawn on them that they 



THE MERCHANT AND HIS MORALS 121 



must be honest and upright in order to succeed in lift 
in the proper sense of the term.' The judge wades a 
little way into the deeps. 

This by the editor of a Tokyo newspaper of the 
front rank is also illuminative : — ' The Times (London) 
observed, a short time ago, that one of the reasons why 
foreign capital did not come to Japan is the fact that 
business men were not able to rely on her commercial 
probity. This is true ; and one of the causes of this 
state of things is the fact that when we were governed 
by warriors our traders were regarded as so many 
insects to be trodden under foot. The merchants of 
those days grew to feel that it made no difference how 
such insignificant creatures as they acted. The credit 
of the country was maintained independently of them. 
But the age has changed, and now we find that in our com- 
petition with other countries the character of our traders 
is a matter of great importance. To suit a new age a new 
class of people is needed, and the work of manufacturing 
this class must be undertaken by teachers as a body.' 

Our final opinion, in charity—for Europe has never 
been commercially sinless — must be that the Japanese 
merchant does not know the sanctity of his bond 
because his father before him did not know the sanctity 
of his. Then he has never had the opportunity of 
appraising the commercial value of the better way, of 
enjoying the profits of that honesty which is the best 
policy. There never was much of a conscience in the 
trading-class of the old, romantic, feudal Japan anyway, 
for they were not thought fit to be trusted with any- 
thing so gentlemanly, and they themselves believed that it 
was much too good for them. By and by they will learn, 
as the judge I have quoted says, that conscience — some 
conscience at any rate — is a duty even among merchants. 



XV 

THE REVOLUTION'S MOTIF? 

The modern mechanic may not yet flourish in Japan, 
nor the merchant trader of integrity. Nevertheless, 
the Industry and Commerce of Japan are both entitled 
to initial capites in print. There is, that is to say, an 
industrial and commercial fabric, a category of native 
and imported industries, and a commercial regime which 
is at least ostensibly modern. One might go further ; 
one might go so far as to say that the Japan of to-day 
is, essentiidlv, an industrial and commercid state. In 
Osaka a hundred and one factory stacks convince you 
that if there be anything real, substantial, finite, deter- 
minate, in the intentions of the modern Japan, it must 
be her purpose of making things, of manufacturing. It 
is impossible, certainly, to laugh at a factory stack. 
Japanese constitutional politics amuse ; there is enter- 
tainment in the social revolutions proceeding in the 
land ; its attempts in new religions have their comic 
aspect. It is different when, after dark, from the rail- 
way that encircles the city, one sees a three-storied, 
five-thousand spindle cotton-mill, ablaze with electric 
light, in the factory quarter of Osaka. It is then 
necessary to feel impressed. A nation does not sit up 
o' nights spinning cotton yarns for fun, nor out of the 
love of experiment. The Osaka cotton-mill is, in fact. 



THE REVOLUTION'S MOTIF? 123 

part of that Industry with a capital, which is so great a 
part of the contemporary Japan. And in the morning 
your jinrikisha man will take you to the Mitsui Bank 
in Osaka, and you will see the Commerce of con- 
temporary Japan, a pilastered, muUioned fabric in white 
granite, with marble entrance hall, mosaic and parquetry 
floors, panelled ceiling, brazen counter fittings, elec- 
troliers, and a proper air of comfortable, dignified, 
reposeful security brooding within the penetralia of the 
place. After one's satiety of the esoteric, the inexplic- 
able, the grotesque, the foolish, the entertaining, these 
things, the hundred and one factory stacks, and the 
palatial bank of Osaka, strike into the stream of one's 
sensations and impressions with a sort of novel 
pertinence. At last there is something solid in the 
Revolution ; this calid maelstrom of change has thrown 
up a rock ; the Experiment is excused, for it has justi- 
fied itself in a three-storey cotton-mill which has paid 
fifteen per cent and may do so again, in banks which 
house themselves in marble halls and pay twelve, 
fifteen, eighteen per cent per annum to their pro- 
prietors. Upon reflection one is inevitably tempted to 
ask whether this be not at length the golden thread 
running through the strange story of the amusing 
Revolution ; whether this be the crisis of its plot, its 
moral, its ' happy ever after ' ; whether it be not the 
essential purpose of the Revolution to make Japan — not 
an Asiatic democracy, or an Oriental limited monarchy, 
or a regenerator of Asia, or even a shining light in 
Oriental darkness — not these, or any of them, but a 
State which will manufacture and export, and rise to 
opulence upon the fat profits of a great external com- 
merce. One speculates now whether it be not necessary 
to go to the national trade statistics for the motif of the 



124 JAPAN 

Japanese Revolution ; whether its heart be not packed 
away in a bale of cotton yarn. 

I can make no definite announcement on this matter, 
having made no discovery of the heart of Japan. But 
Marquis Ito said a year or two back, on an occasion of 
importance, * Geography has decreed that Japan shall 
be a commercial nation,' and I know that in the last 
three or four years nearly every Japanese statesman of 
influence has said the same thing in the same terms or 
differently ; some, as Marquis Ito himself, over and 
over again. They have not said how Japan is to be a 
commercial nation with incompetent mechanics and 
lying merchants ; but it is certain that if they speak 
what they believe, they believe that Destiny has im- 
posed a law upon their country of greatness founded 
upon Industry and Commerce, if it is to be great. It 
seems, then, that whether or not the heart of the 
modern Japan be in the country's table of exports and 
imports, the fabric of the Osaka cotton-mills rests, so to 
speak, upon a law, imperative and recognised. It is 
not everything, every institution in Japan, that has its 
raison so open, so obvious, so sufficient. One looks in 
vain for the raison of the country's party politics. 
Apparently it need not be so with regard to its Industry 
and Commerce. 

And truly, take the Japanese industrial and com- 
mercial economy in what aspect or upon what flank 
you like, you encounter a grave reality and serious 
purpose, a fixity and continuity of effort, of policy, of 
aim, which is chiefly absent elsewhere, as in the country's 
religions, its art, its politics, its social canons. These 
lack even a law of change, an order of revolution. 
They are by that token chaos. But there is a Code for 
the Industry and Commerce of the country and an 



THE REVOLUTION'S MOTIF? 125 

effort to administer it, the lapses from which are re- 
laxations rather than dalliance or mutability. Perhaps 
this happens because the Revolution has here nothing 
to revolutionise ; because Japan always was an industrial 
and commercial state even if it did not in the former eras 
trade abroad. At any rate it is highly significant to 
find some of the ultimate industrial and commercial 
phenomena of Europe indigenous to the country. 
Labour has been organised in Japan for centuries, after its 
own way as effectively, as elaborately organised, as it is 
in Western Europe. There have been trade guilds in 
Japan for at least a century and a half, and to-day they 
are by way of being intolerant trades unions that 
regulate the price of mason-work per yard, and open 
communication with the ironmaster who promotes his 
own nominee from journeyman to foreman. The 
Japanese worker is much more his own employer even 
when he is paid so much per day. Lately, for instance, 
the ship carpenters of Yokohama preferred a demand 
for an increase of wages. Having previously advised 
carpenters at other centres — likely sources of an alter- 
native labour supply — of their intention to strike if their 
demand should be refused, they duly struck. The em- 
ployers tried three great labour markets without success, 
even upon offer of higher wages than they had paid to 
the strikers, and though carpenters came from places 
which had not been notified by the Yokohama union, 
these mostly went home when they had been informed 
of the situation. Finally, the smaller employers took 
back their old men, but the Dock Company of 
Yokohama, more powerful than the others, engaged new 
men and paid them higher wages than their old hands 
had asked. The blackleg is scarcely known on these 
occasions. He is almost impossible. So, if it be a sign 



126 JAPAN 

of high industrial development and great industrial 
capacity when a nation's workers are capable of resolute 
combination, Japanese Industry was Europeanised 
before the country heard a rumour of Europe. Japan 
on this condition was an industrial state long ago. 
Moreover, if an apprenticeship system be a corner-stone 
of the industrial fabric, Japanese Industry should be an 
edifice of most remarkable solidity, for the Japanese 
apprentice grows from childhood to manhood in his 
employer's service. He begins from ten years of age, 
and may be released in ten years or fifteen. Sometimes 
he serves for twenty years or twenty-five, but as a 
middle-aged man he reaps his reward, for at the end of 
his service his employer sets him up in business. Even 
this boon is not without its mitigation, for, says a recent 
Government Report on this and kindred matters, ' The 
assistance so rendered by the employer creates a bond 
resembling the family relation. The master is en- 
titled to interfere in the family affairs of his former 
apprentice, while the latter is expected to obey him.' 
It is not apprenticeship, but adoption. 

And with an apprenticeship of ten or fifteen years — 
when it is not adoption — and a historical aptitude for 
combination — the final accomplishment of European 
and American craftsmanship — Japanese labour is also 
cheap by comparison. Not so many years ago it was 
dirt cheap, but the barometer of economic values has 
been rising steadily in the last decade or so. A 
Japanese - compiled table shows that in 1887 the 
Japanese carpenter had his fivepence per day to raise a 
family on. Now it seems he might raise two families, 
with something over. He has his fourteen or fifteen- 
pence per day in these expansive times, but of course he 
pays more for the bread and butter of his life, his rice 



THE REVOLUTION'S MOTIF? 127 

and fish. Nevertheless we may say that while it 
exhibits, even in accentuated form, the principal 
phenomena of the most admired industrial systems of 
the West, Japanese Industry has also this character, 
that its working expenses — its operatives' wages — are 
even yet dirt cheap at nine shillings or ten per week for 
skilled joinery, and somewhat less or somewhat more 
for other service of the priests of the hierarchy of 
Labour. Japanese Industry upon these signs has a fair 
and auspicious aspect. Upon these signs its Labour 
is at least an organisation, and by no means an expensive 
organisation. 

On the other hand, there are facts which are merely 
hideous, though at the same time even these require 
one — if only by reason of their hideousness — to think 
and to write of Japanese Industry and Commerce as of 
an affair of serious import, substantial, solid, significant, 
amid a welter of whimsicalities, political, ethical, social, 
born of the Revolution. Take the case and the con- 
dition of the factory girls of Osaka. Many of them 
are children of ten, a few of eight, even of six. There 
is a day shift and a night shift — 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., 
6 P.M. to 6 A.M., the working hours in each instance 
eleven. Sunday is a working day. There is a day 
and a half's holiday per month. ' The employees,' 
(says one account) * are usually pale and sickly looking, 
more especially the younger girls, who are thin and 
anasmic in the majority of cases. The atmosphere in 
the mills is oppressive, and impregnated with dust and 
small particles of cotton. There are small pivot 
windows in the buildings, about 2 feet 6 inches by i foot 
6 inches, seven or eight feet from the floors. The 
manager informed me that these windows are usually 
opened three or four times per day for a few minutes. 



128 JAPAN 

As wind interferes with the work, disturbing the cotton, 
they are only opened when the air is calm. In the 
summer it is very often impossible to open them, and 
the temperature rises above lOO degrees Fahrenheit. 
It is necessary, especially for good weaving, that the 
atmosphere should be humid. An endeavour is there- 
fore made to keep the temperature from falling below 
84 degrees. Boarding - houses are provided for the 
operatives. In one, containing sixteen rooms, each 
about 12 feet by 12 feet, there were two hundred 
adults and children — that is, twelve persons per room. 
I saw in a room of about 22 feet by 14 feet about 
thirty-five night-workers asleep.' The girls are paid 
from 2d. to 8d. per day. There are child-apprentices 
earning id. per day. The employees are liable to be 
prevented, by force, if need be, from leaving the factory 
precincts. In 1900 forty of them, in a mill in Central 
Japan, lost their lives because the doors of their blazing 
dormitory were locked from the outside. The owner 
went unpunished, primarily because it is necessary for 
the Japanese mills to undercut the Bombay export ; 
also because cotton spindles are not indigenous to Japan, 
and there is no public opinion to protect the unskilled 
labour which looks after them. Enghsh conditions of 
the forties and fifties are mirrored here ; the old and 
indigenous trades are organised and competent for their 
own defence. They do not ask the protection of public 
opinion, and probably their security and independence 
cover up the helplessness and misery of the victims of 
the newer commercial and industrial regime. Never- 
theless a first Labour Law was promulgated in 1902, 
and there is seed of a Labour Movement in the 
country. 

The granite pilastered bank in Osaka is to the com- 



THE REVOLUTION'S MOTIF? 129 

merce of Japan what its near neighbour the three-storied 
cotton-mill is to the Industry of the country. It is, that 
is to say, a sort of figurehead. It is a token, and it 
isn't ; a splendid mask with a quasi-splendid substance 
of things behind it. Certainly the law of necessity 
environs the Commercial as well as the Industrial regime. 
The Commercial regime refuses equally with the Industrial 
to be treated as a whimsicality of the Revolution. It is 
here necessary to take the country seriously, if only 
because it is so obvious that Japan here takes herself 
seriously. The country is conscious of a law of com- 
mercial destiny even if its mind be a perpetual doubt or 
indifference as to the canons of religion and the prin- 
ciples of party politics. She builds a bank of Japan in 
Tokyo, which is our National Gallery somewhat glorified, 
but she toys with all the religions and with a score of 
philosophies, ancient and modern. 

Up to 1889 there was no column for cotton yarn in 
the tabulated statistics of Japanese exports. In 1890 it 
had won its place on a total export of ^236 : 4s. In 
1902, among thirty candidates for space, it asked the 
widest column after the silk export. The export oi 
cotton yarn in 1902 was ^^2, 03 1,6 14. The export of 
cotton fabrics, in the tables of twelve and fifteen years 
ago, appears in hundreds of pounds. Nowadays it is 
swollen to ^300,000 or so annually. Not so long since 
Japan bought lucifer matches. In 1902 she exported 
^834,017 worth. Seventeen or eighteen years ago she 
first began to make handkerchiefs of her silk. She now 
exports j^400,ooo worth in a year. These are pheno- 
mena in imported or adopted industries. The country 
exported raw silk from the first day of her communica- 
tion with the great world, but whereas thirty years ago 
the yearly export was half a million sterling's worth, it 

K 



I30 JAPAN 

was in 1902 ^^ 7, 8 46, 07 2. Coal is one and three-quarter 
million's worth against £ 1 8,000 ; porcelain and earthen- 
ware a quarter of a million's worth against ^10,000. 
And so on. 

The best of Japan's factories and workshops are 
probably better than the best outside the United States. 
Experts in foundry work and ship repair in Government- 
owned shops in Hong-Kong come to Japan and find 
machine tools they long to mother. There are indeed 
but a few such shops in Japan, but they send commis- 
sioners to the United States and Europe once in two 
years or three to get the best without reference to cost. 
The great chiefs of Japanese industry are not, then, 
conservative. They will * scrap ' you any old machine 
which they are financially able to replace with a newer. 

Moreover, there is a faculty of invention in Japan 
which is not wholly imitative, though often so alleged. 
They have their own Murata rifle in their army, and 
there is a Japanese quick-firing gun which time and war 
may test. Above all, there is the money-making bent 
in the country. ' We are natural traders,' says one of 
them highly successful in New York. ' They are born 
traders,' says an American with twenty years' experience 
of them. 

This is the commercial figurehead — the splendid 
mask — the bank offices in granite and marble. There 
is but a quasi-splendour behind ; there is even squalor, 
counterpart of the industrial wretchedness in the cotton- 
mills. There is the canker of commercial immorality, 
a disease of origins, at any rate of traditions, circulating 
a poisonous virus throughout the commercial system of 
the country. There is a commercial vertigo which 
takes the heads of men in crises of good fortune and ill. 
Fifteen or twenty years ago cotton-spinning in Osaka 



THE REVOLUTION'S MOTIF? 131 

began to be an immensely lucrative business. Directors 
and shareholders grabbed the profits, all of them, and 
lived in a fool's paradise of expectation that it would go 
on always. Reserve funds and depreciation deductions 
were chiefly unregarded, and in the fulness of a very 
short time, commercially speaking, there was a shattered 
remnant of what had been a phalanx. There is, too, an 
incapacity for conservation among masters, as among 
men — conservation of the uses and qualifications of 
machines and their souls. Said Count Inouye, one of 
the statesmen of the country, not long since : ' There 
is a tendency on the part of Japanese industrials to think 
of immediate profits only and to neglect ordinary prin- 
ciples of economy. Rolling stock and machines are 
strained to the utmost capacity of their power. There 
is not a factory in Tokyo that I have not visited, and 
there is not a factory among them all which can be said 
to satisfy all the requirements of economy.' There is 
great contempt for the intelligence of buyers. A 
Japanese maker sends out a good class of article to get 
a name. He gets his name and proceeds to make and 
sell soiled goods to give the next new man his oppor- 
tunity. It seems generous, but as business it is wholly 
bad. There is also an almost universal scheme of secret 
commissions whose ramifications reach the palm of the 
very servant of your dinner-table. She has her half- 
pence without kicks from your greengrocer, milkman, 
and cobbler. There is too a notable lack of commercial 
directness. Generally speaking, the Japanese rice-broker 
when he goes to propose a deal inquires in the first place 
for the health of the other fellow's wife or mother-in- 
law ; he may also talk politics and the prospects of an 
early winter. Casually, as it were gingerly, he intro- 
duces his business proposals, and the transaction is 



132 JAPAN 

clinched at a tea-house amid the essential hilarity of the 
wine cup. This is to make business a pleasure, but in 
a new sort of way, more Japonica. 

Finally, there is that stiffest of brakes on the progress 
of Industry and Commerce — deficiency of working 
capital, for, despite her marbled bank offices, Japan is 
poor as riches are counted in Europe. 

Nevertheless, there is the column given to the cotton 
yarn export in the Trade Tables — white thirteen years 
ago, black with a seven-figure entry in 1902. This is 
not grotesque or fantastic ; paradoxical or quixotic. It 
is excellent business ; a mask perhaps — for it hides 
ansemic factory girls who are helots — yet in one view a 
splendid mask. It is the beginning of the fulfilment of 
the industrial and commercial destiny of Japan. The 
country may take — the best opinion now says it must 
take — generations to realise this destiny, but is not the 
consciousness of a destiny the beginning of its realisation } 



XVI 

THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION 

It is certain, I take it, that Japan has come into the 
international fight at the beginning of an era when 
the battle is mostly to the longest purse and the race 
to the slickest in its uses. There is, in this circum- 
stance, much concern for Japan's Revolution. Dip 
into Japanese history and you will find that the country 
has always bred Generals. The question now is, Can 
she raise the financial and commercial genius who is 
the General of the new era } Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, 
lyeyasu, were men of the Cromwellian mould. In 
point of time they ' anticipated ' the Protector, who, 
in fact, might have learned from the last-named how 
usurpers may inhibit their disinterment by successors. 
Usurper lyeyasu lies nobly buried at Nikko these three 
centuries, but where is Cromwell's dust ? Nevertheless, 
even if there be more glorious Cromwells in Japanese 
history, the fact is scarcely to the point to-day when 
the question is whether she breeds a frequent or even 
an occasional prince of the house of Baring Brothers or 
J. P. Morgan and Co. The conditions of the modern 
struggle require Japan to ask of herself whether the 
higher commercial mind is part of her intellectual 
furniture ; whether she can import Imagination into the 
dry goods business and mix her paint with brains ; 
whether she has the commercial Statesman for the 

133 



134 JAPAN 

service of her ambitions and the defence of her rights. 
Partially this is the interesting question : whether it 
is easier for a nation to learn to sell the produce of its 
skilled labour to the best advantage than to teach its 
labour to be skilled ; whether, in brief, it is less or 
more difficult to sell a thing well than to make it well. 
The question is answered in Europe and America by 
the simple historical fact that the Mechanic was earning 
an honest wage generations before the Master of 
the Trust began to reap his dubiously earned millions. 
It is answered universally by the simple economic fact 
that the thing must be made before it can be sold. 
The facts thus aver that if Japan has not yet bred the 
Mechanic it is against History and Political Economy 
to expect that she should possess the Trust Master. 
Here again, however, Japan makes a mock of the 
' facts ' ; neither History nor Political Economy is 
law unto her. She will make her own precedents, 
even her own economic logic. She sees and proves 
truth in a contradiction of terms. 

For, though the competent experts usually agree 
that Japan has not yet produced the Modern Mechanic, 
the foreign and native press of Japan bear frequent 
testimony to the aptitude of the mind — of the leading 
minds, at any rate — of this people of contradictions for 
the broad aspects, the intricate problems of finance, for 
the statesmanship of commerce and its philosophy. No 
study, save that of the English language, is, I suppose, 
more popular than Political Economics in Japan. J. S. 
Mill has an authority there which accuses his own 
countrymen of some meanness of mind towards him, 
or alternatively convicts our friends of some lack of 
the sense of proportion in their estimate of intellectual 
values. The ' Combine ' and the Trust are already almost 



THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION 135 

a fad in some Japanese industries. This possibly is not 
very relevant nor very reassuring evidence of the depth 
or of the sincerity of the Japanese study of economics ; 
but, that the mind of the commercial General, of the 
Prince of the House of J. P. Morgan and Co. is present 
and active in the country, — though that of the inspired 
mechanic be merely a future intention of its evolution, 
— is sufficiently warranted by the acts and speech which 
day by day express the national industrial conspiracy 
and the national commercial policy. It is not, in fact, 
so very wonderful that Japan should possess the higher 
commercial mind even while she is still in lack of the 
lower mechanic hand. It is not, after all, an inexplicable 
paradox to say that she knows how to sell well what she 
cannot yet make well ; that she is selling things while 
she has still to learn how to make them. The East, 
from Suez to Yokohama, is philosophically proficient, 
and the Japanese mind is unquestionably Oriental. It 
has the Eastern leaning to the abstract, with the Eastern 
disinclination to heavy hammer work, even if it be 
Nasmyth's hammer. Moreover, the Japanese mind 
had exercise in the larger manipulations of commerce 
and an introduction to the phenomena of monopolies 
and ' big deals ' in the days of her proud and poor 
seclusion. Several Japanese millionaires of to-day (there 
is a group of millionaires in yen, which are florins ; 
there are few, if any, in pounds sterling) date the rise 
of their grandfather's or great-grandfather's fortunes 
from just such able and despicable dodges in the 
Japanese home market of the dark times before 1859 
as we witness in these enlightened hours in the pork 
and grain markets of Chicago. At this day they 
freeze an obnoxious man out of the exchanges of 
Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, in sunny Japan, with as icy 



136 JAPAN 

and effective a pressure as they manage amid the con- 
genial blizzards that blow in from Lake Michigan. 
The Japanese know more than a thing or two along 
these tortuous lines. They knew the whole book by 
heart — long ago. Here, to be sure, it is the shadow we 
see. No light without darkness, and there is much 
darkness in Japan by reason of the employment of the 
light of the imagination in the Japanese exchange and 
mart. 

The point, however, is that the Americans having 
forced the world to recognise the Business Imagination 
as the weapon in the international duel of the era, 
Japan, like the rest of us, needs to have it. It cannot 
well be ordered with the next shipment of quick-firers ; 
clearly, indeed, it is the sort of thing she must furnish 
out of her own resources. And it is probable that the 
country's resources are adequate to this special need. 
She has, I have said, the Oriental mind, with its love of 
the abstract and its admixture of cunning, a com- 
paratively important ally of the Business Imagination. 
Moreover, the suave tyrants of her domestic markets, 
as I have also said, were practising those manoeuvres 
which are proper to the high employments of the 
Business Imagination, when the Americans, its high 
exemplars, were warring for the right to rule their own 
tea market. 

Judge if Japan has or has not some endowment of 
the ' business imagination ' from these words of Marquis 
Ito, who, though doubtless the country's Nestor, and 
therefore scarcely representative, here only crystallises 
the meditation and brooding of the traders, bankers, 
exporters, his countrymen : ' The Japanese ' (the Marquis 
said, speaking to or for an assemblage of business men 
in Tokyo four years ago) ' have outlived the days of the 



THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION 137 

isolation of their destiny. To maintain our ground, to 
command a share of the gifts of fortune, it is of para- 
mount importance for us to devote the strength and 
the sinew of our energy to the expansion and the 
upbuilding of our industries and our trade. I look to 
China as the field which our business enterprise should 
aspire to harvest. Geography has decreed that Japan 
shall be a commercial nation. We cross a ribbon of 
sea and tread a vast empire, boundless in extent, its 
hidden treasures intact, its millions upon millions of 
people ready to absorb the produce of the world and 
yet to want more. Shall we wonder that the nations 
of the earth jostle each other in their hurry to establish 
and extend their markets in that great country .'' Japan, 
by the very force of circumstances, is compelled to build 
her modern statehood upon a foundation of industry 
and trade. It is in China that the merchants and 
manufacturers of the world will fight their future 
battles for commercial supremacy. Should we — should 
the merchants and manufacturers of this country — fail 
to plant, to root themselves in the soil of China before 
the field is usurped by their rivals, not only will a 
deathblow be struck at our trade and commerce but 
our national existence itself may be menaced.' 

You perceive herefrom that there is a Japanese 
business imagination, and that it dreams, which to do 
is of course the fine faculty of the Imagination. It 
also conceives a plan, a course of action, that which is 
certainly a commercial policy ; whereby it is proved that 
the business imagination of Japan is practical, that it 
dreams to a purpose. This is weighty support of that 
paradox about the Japanese, that, though they have not 
yet produced the true mechanic or the upright merchant, 
they have yet minds which are apt unto the statesman- 



138 JAPAN 

ship of commerce and its philosophy. The Japanese 
business imagination not only exists ; it has, I say, 
formulated a commercial policy. I have given one of 
its foremost men's disclosure of the policy. The same 
imagination has conceived an industrial conspiracy. I 
will give words of Count Okuma to myself exposing 
it. Count Okuma is ex-Prime Minister, ex-Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, and Sage-in-Ordinary to the throne 
and people of Japan — a remarkable man, who lost a leg 
to a reactionary's bomb ten years ago. ' Our cotton 
yarns,' Count Okuma said, ' were at first a poor unsuc- 
cessful manufacture. But now we can compete with 
English and Indian yarns. Only the finer cotton yarns 
are now imported into this country from England. 
And even in these we are successfully competing with 
you, so as, in fact, to be gradually expelling your 
article from our markets. In other manufactures, once 
peculiarly yours or Europe's, we are able to compete 
successfully with you and other peoples in China, in 
Australia, in South America.' ' It is probable,' said a 
recent Japanese Minister of Home Affairs to me at a 
' set ' interview in the autumn of 1902 — ' it is probable 
that Europe and America — the outside world at large — 
is now at the top of the tide of its selling trade with 
Japan. We hope from now onwards to buy less and 
less from the world by buying more and more from 
ourselves,' — meaning that Japan as an increasing market 
for the producer beyond the seas is to be no more — is 
already no more. 

The higher commercial mind of Japan, the country's 
aptitude for the statesmanship and philosophy of com- 
merce, the imagination of its princes of the House of 
J. P. Morgan and Co., conspire industrially, you recog- 
nise, to sweep the foreign manufacturer from his position 



THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION 139 

of power in Japan and put a native dynasty in his place. 
Besides, there has been conceived a policy, which is also 
something of a conspiracy. There is a policy which is 
a design upon the commercial hegemony of the Pacific, 
per capture of the Chinese market. 

Both policy and conspiracy are quite overt — quite 
natural indeed, and obvious and praiseworthy. It is 
not a disclosure I am making. As Marquis Ito hints, 
it is the mere force of circumstances — the plot of destiny, 
and all that Japan does is to listen, to yield to the 
counsels of Destiny. It is news to no observing person 
in Japan that the Japanese wish to cut the ground from 
the feet of the foreign importer and to lift their country 
upon the tide of the industrial and commercial progress 
they hope to make into the seat of the master industrial 
and commercial power of the Pacific. I am disclosing 
this subtle conspiracy, this machiavellian policy, to those 
otherwise sensible people outside Japan with whom 
the Japanese are a people very small in stature, very 
quaint, very amusing, and very clever at making pretty 
things. 

There is indeed a mountain of difficulty and detri- 
ment in the path of the policy and conspiracy which 
the business imagination or higher commercial mind of 
Japan has conceived at the prompting of Destiny. The 
failure to produce the inspired mechanic and the moral 
merchant trader is half the mountain. The rest is 
chiefly financial impotence and some defects of qualities. 
Moreover — this might be read, if not printed, in italics 
— in Japan's Commerce things are a good deal as they 
are in Japan's Politics. That is to say, there are a few 
men in the van — far in the van — who think, dream, con- 
ceive, hope, and are brought to bed of great ideas, who, 
in fact, lead, not without profit to themselves in the 



I40 JAPAN 

way-going. In the rear — far in the rear — there is a mass, 
a mob, a rabble, almost an anarchy, which, doubting 
that the leaders lead, scarcely in fact seeing the light the 
leaders hold on high because of their dimness of vision, 
or by reason of the light being held so high or carried 
so far in front, struggles in the morass of ancient incom- 
petence, under the inky night of the prejudices and 
ignorances of a former age, bound the while by chains 
of insularity, vanity, contempt, and mere dalliance, an 
unblest heritage from the old social and political Japan. 
And the ability to see being seldom joined to a strong 
faculty of doing — unpracticality being the common defect 
of the quality of vision — there is an easy explanation of 
the deficiency which is characteristic even of the men 
who lead in Japanese commerce ; they are apt to hold 
aloof from the spade-work. As to the errors and wander- 
ings among the mass behind them, there is a succinct 
account of them in a homily of the pioneer among 
Japanese merchant princes, Baron Shibusawa, first of his 
kind in the conquest of the fame of a literal commercial 
nobility. Baron Shibusawa, whose ennobling was a 
nine days' wonder not so long since in Japan because 
the filth of successful trade is on him, returned to his 
country lately from a tour of the world. Then he told 
his brethren what creatures they were. ' In the West * 
(he said) ' business men wield a recognised and powerful 
influence as well in politics and other spheres of activity 
as in their own. What is the situation in Japan ? I 
cannot help sighing when I realise anew how strong the 
disposition of contempt towards business and business 
men still is in Japan, and how truly the respect some- 
times paid to us is more a form than of the heart. I 
find that abroad Japan is scarcely yet known or recog- 
nised as a member of the circle of international business 



THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION 141 

and industry. Why is this ? We must shake ofF the 
content of sloth, but above all, drop our prejudices 
overboard to the end that in spirit and in fact we 
move forward to become part of the business system of 
the world.' And from this onwards Baron Shibusawa 
designated particular evils — commercial immorality, 
obstruction of the operations of foreign capital, lack 
of agencies of knowledge, and so forth, fruit of the 
unblest legacy. 

You must know, however, that the men who dream, 
who have dreamt, and in theory have already woven 
the plot of Japan's commercial destiny, who have mixed 
their paint with brains and imported Imagination into the 
dry goods business, are not unbefriended in their own 
country. Marquis Ito, who is, as it were, the Emperor's 
Executive, encourages them, as we have seen, with the 
spade-work of advice. We may at least say that they 
are now patronised by the official demi-gods. And 
there is a Minister of Commerce, albeit he is also of 
Agriculture, and universal Chambers of Commerce 
which have at least the ranking of debating societies 
in the land. There are periodic National Industrial 
Exhibitions graced by the Imperial presence at their 
opening ; there are commissions of commercial inquiry 
to see what is being done abroad and what Japan can 
do there ; and there is the impoverishment in these 
times of the proudest in the land to compel them to 
take on the grime of trade and recognise its honour. 
There is Marquis Ito's announcement in London two 
years ago : ' The focus of international commercial 
competition is steadily moving towards the Pacific* 
There is the commercial hegemony of the Pacific, 
burning lodestar bright in the eyes of the men who 
plot for their own and their country's good in Japan. 



XVII 

MEN V. FORMS IN POLITICS 

Japan lately achieved her eighth General Election ; the 
eighth in a Parliamentary history of fourteen years, a 
Constitution having been 'inaugurated' in 1889. This 
country proves all things. It has been proving repre- 
sentative government in eight General Elections and ten 
changes of Government in fourteen years. One expects 
better things of France, but to Japan everything may 
be allowed by a Western world which for the first time 
loves an Asiatic people — the sum of the reasons why 
being perhaps this people's worship of the Beautiful. 

It would be a mistake to discuss or to try to view 
the arithmetical ficts — the eight General Elections and 
the ten Ministries — of Japan's fourteen years of the 
forms of Representative Government from the solemn 
historical point of view. They are interesting, but they 
are not much more that is yet worth the while of the 
philosophic historian. They are not important, for 
they signify nothing. It will be time to review the 
growth of constitutional government in Japan when it 
has grown — say fifty or a hundred years hence, if at all. 

One of the cautions justly urged upon commentators 
on Japanese afKiirs is the avoidance of the absolute, but 
one may safely affirm — indeed, it is only saying the same 
thing in another way — that it is impossible to deduce 

142 



MEN V. FORMS IN POLITICS 143 

any general principles from the experience of this country 
in the usage of the political institutions she has adopted 
from a European country known as Prussia-England- 
France. 

Could it possibly be otherwise ? Fourteen years' 
experience of representative government on a franchise 
as restricted as that of England before 1832 — is it 
possible that any fixed principles or any settled practice 
— principles or practice to which poor China, oppressed 
by a disease of dimension, might fly as to a panacea — 
could emerge from this trifling flutter with institutions 
which not seven hundred years of an established and 
recognised status has rendered more than convenient in 
Great Britain ? Those who would have China recast 
her polity in a mould imported from Japan should wait 
a little — say two hundred years or so. 

That which Japan has till now accomplished in 
politics has been accomplished by men, not by institu- 
tions. If China, or Asia at large, could recast her men 
in the Japanese mould, the world might soon as justly 
admire China, or Asia, as it now justly admires Japan. 
Tell China to copy Japanese institutions and be some- 
body in the world. Tell her also to buy pom-poms 
and defy Russian encroachment. It is the same thing. 
Tell a Chinese mother to bear a Marquis Ito or a 
General Kitchener. This is another and the right 
thing. Japanese politics have reached finality in 
nothing, and finality is necessary if you are to have 
general principles. It is more than doubtful if Japan 
has arrived upon the threshold, or entered the vestibule, 
of the palace of constitutional politics. So poor, so 
meagre, is the work of the Revolution in one direction. 

One General Election day — August 10, 1902, a 
Sunday — I drove round the polling -stations in the 



144 JAPAN 

Manchester-Birmingham-Leeds of Japan — Osaka, a city 
of nearly a million people, second only to Tokyo. 
Some 10,000 of the million — or rather the two-thirds 
of them who voted — returned six members. There 
were four polling-stations — for the north, south, east, 
and west districts of the city. The polling-station in 
each instance was the office of the district or ward local 
government. 

With eyes that have looked upon what popular 
suffrage has brought us to in England on election day 
— and a month in front of it — you see even at the door 
of an odd polling-station in Japan that your Ally has a 
long way to go towards the finalities of popular govern- 
ment, if, haply, the fates or the Revolution decree that 
she is to seek the finalities, or to reach them. Without 
a guide you would strike a General Election in a 
Japanese city only by accident, and then you might 
take it for a funeral. A few groups of decorous, well- 
dressed men, waiting for the coffin to appear ; in their 
midst a gentleman in frock-coat — a candidate and 
his election committee. Some stand waiting in the 
narrow street, others under the eaves of the small, low- 
browed Japanese houses, a row of which, opposite the 
polling-station, has been appropriated as committee- 
rooms for the day, their fronts removed. The com- 
mittee is in black or grey silk Japanese dress, the 
candidate in European frock-coat. There are police- 
men in white duck and electroplated scabbards. In 
the drowsy hot-season afternoon an occasional jinrikisha 
rattles up the street bringing a voter. You will find 
another candidate under the porch of the polling-station, 
bowing deep to each voter as he arrives. The candidate 
will not be fatigued at the end of it, and the use of the 
bow is not declared an act of corruption even in the 



MEN V. FORMS IN POLITICS 145 

latest Law of Elections, which, nevertheless, is very 
stringent. In the committee-rooms there is always tea, 
with cigarettes, and pipes the bowls of which would 
leave a space in the cup of my lady's thimble. There 
is much tea-sipping and much puffing of highly philo- 
sophic cigarettes. The street of the polling-station is 
roped off from the great, busy, humming world beyond, 
and across its mouth the great world passes in endless, 
booming procession, turning an occasional semi-curious 
face towards the General Election, waiting in the calm, 
sunny side -street for the coffin to appear. The 
busy Japanese world respects the privacy — the quiet 
gravity — the ' apartness ' — of the Japanese General 
Election. 

And this, mind you, is your Japanese Election Day 
in the heart of a great city, a city that, more even 
than Tokyo, the capital, holds the secret of Japan's 
future — the greatest industrial hive of the Far East, 
where by night you will see three- and four-storied 
cotton factories piercing the darkness with a hundred 
serried window-eyes illuminated from the electric lamps 
by the light of which the night-shift is finishing the 
day-shift's work. 

The election crowd, the election meeting, election 
literature, deputations, candidates' addresses, the stump 
speech, ' burning questions,' ' paramount issues,' — these 
and a host more are practically unknown in Japan in the 
European sense or degree. Canvassing is important 
— so important that during this election of 1902 
some voters put up warnings at their private houses : 
' No admittance to Parliamentary candidates,' — with 
ways of persuasion so devious that a new and better 
Election Law was lately promulgated, with some slight 
effect. 



146 JAPAN 

Manifestoes by leaders are known ; so are the pro- 
fessional politician and various sorts of candidates — 
party, local, national, independent. So also is voting 
by a two-thirds proportion of the 900,000 who, among 
the 45,000,000 of a population, are entitled to vote. 

With this scrappy catalogue of the symptoms of 
popular politics your Japanese General Election begins 
and takes end. 

In England and America the voter is the State. 
This is the finality, a finality, of constitutional politics, 
and on the whole we have found the voter a good, 
progressive, intelligent State. In Japan he is still part 
of an experiment with Occidental notions of govern- 
ment. With us he is the basic political institution. 
In Japan the authorities ask him to vote that they may 
see what will come of it. 

The fact is, that of political institutions as we 
understand them in England — or in Europe at large 
— Japan has as yet but one — the Emperor. Not that 
the Emperor is the State. Far from it. There is what 
is called a Cabinet. It is really a council, or occasional 
meeting, of the leading statesmen of the realm — a 
sanhedrim of its wise men. There is a Prime Minister. 
He may be the real chief of the strongest party in the 
country, but if he is it is largely a fortuitous circum- 
stance. At present — at the time I write — he is the 
columnar capital, or figurehead, of the executive, and 
not much more. The present Prime Minister is a com- 
posite of men known as the Elder Statesmen — of whom 
Marquis Ito is the chief — with the Emperor as a kind 
of Heavenly Destiny behind them. When Marquis 
Ito took office one person became Prime Minister — 
Marquis Ito. 

If I seem to write in paradoxes, refer to the Anglo- 



MEN V. FORMS IN POLITICS 147 

Japanese Alliance. Count Katsura, the Prime Minister, 
went up one step in the peerage for having been at the 
head of the Ministry in whose period of office the 
Alliance was concluded, but Marquis Ito made it known 
that he himself had something to do with it. This, in 
effect, means that he and the other Elder Statesmen — 
Inouye, Matsukata, Yamagata, and others — had every- 
thing to do with it. It is as if Lord Salisbury had 
invited Lord Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, Mr. 
Morley, and perhaps Mr. Labouchere, besides his own 
lieutenants, to give their opinions on the Treaty of 
Alliance, and on the policy it affirmed, before Lord 
Lansdowne should put his hand and seal to it. Note 
also these facts. Up to his removal from party politics 
some months ago, by his appointment as President of 
the Privy Council, or Chief Adviser in Permanence to 
the Emperor, Marquis Ito had had a considerable party 
majority in the lower house of the Diet — their House 
of Commons — for nearly three years, but he had not 
been in office since March 1901. The circumstance is 
indifferent — to him. He had and has his say — the 
largest say — in the control of affairs. 

We place our Prime Minister and our Cabinet and 
our Party System among our essential and salient poli- 
tical institutions. They are with us the crystallisation, 
the ultimate expression, of popular government, Japan 
has all of these and yet none of them. Her only 
political institution, in the sense in which the Party 
System is a political institution in England, is the 
Emperor. You can know how and where he stands 
in the polity of the country, how and under what cir- 
cumstances he acts, and what are the effects of his acts. 
He is a fixed quantity. The other figures and forms 
are algebraic surds. In the rout of the Revolution the 



148 JAPAN 

other figures and forms have not been precipitated to 
fixed place and function by the acid of Western 
modes of thinking and doing. They still swim as in 
a flux. 

Wherefore it is profitless, because it is impossible, 
to compose political didactics from the example of Japan 
for the benefit of all Asia. There is indeed an appear- 
ance, an apparition, a presumption of constitutional 
politics and representative government, and by and by 
the form may be inhabited by the spirit. The two 
principal parties in the State find a line of separation 
and a motif of opposition in the varying pitch of their 
invocation of the Constitution. One shouts for the 
Constitution in B minor, the other in the high C. 
Therefore they are two parties. All for the Consti- 
tution, but there must be some point of distinction. 
There must be Parties, because there are Parties in 
France, in Germany, in England. 

Beneath or above the chaos there is among the men 
who rule, without any mandate or authority from the 
Constitution, a genuine patriotism, the wisdom of 
experience, the born intellect, and will, sagacity, ambi- 
tion for the country. It is not party government ; it 
is not popular government ; neither is it autocracy. 
The Emperor is still divine enough, or near enough 
the gods, to be far above mere men and their politics. 
He is a political institution, but he is not in politics, 
except when, as it seems to the people, he condescends, 
god- like, on rare occasions to show his ministers how 
it should be done, which he does according to the 
prescribed forms of the written Constitution. 

Japan is an oligarchy with the forms of popular 
government. The whole process of the quasi -con- 
stitutional government of the country of the present 



MEN V. FORMS IN POLITICS 149 

time sifts the result — admirable, if it were admirably 
accomplished — that the best political minds, the best 
statesmanship that the country possesses, is at the back 
of every important act and decision of the Government 
of the time being. 

This is why Japan's eight General Elections and ten 
Ministries in fourteen years are unimportant. This is 
why it is not a very serious matter that corrupt and 
interested purposes should be, as they most frequently 
are, the motive of Parliamentary candidature. This is 
why the failure of the Japanese Constitution is not 
perhaps very seriously significant. 

Neither is it very important that the greater part of 
the people lack the suffrage, and wouldn't know what 
to do with it if they had it. Japan, we may suppose, 
has set foot on the long road towards government by 
and for the people, but in this sphere at least she has 
not achieved in a decade that which we Western peoples 
have barely accomplished in five centuries. 

Said Marquis Ito in a speech eighteen months ago : 
• What is the fruit of constitutional politics } Party 
people used to ask us if it consisted in the formation of 
a Party Cabinet or a Cabinet responsible to the people. 
I do not think this explanation has been found correct. 
A moment's deliberation on Japan's history will tell 
you that this interpretation is fallacious. In my opinion 
the fruit of constitutional politics can only be gathered 
by a civilised people. With the progress of national 
civilisation, and with the elevation of the knowledge of 
the people, they will be able to form just opinions on 
affairs ; and when the people, advanced to this stage, 
move in the sphere allowed them by the Constitution, 
they will be able to enjoy to the full the benefits of 
constitutional politics.' 



ISO JAPAN 

This is a confession — a confession of the failure of 
Japan's Constitution, by its high priest, by its author. 
Nevertheless, before and after, over and under, Japan's 
Constitution, there is her political strength — her leaders, 
her statesmen. 




O K 



XVIII 

CONSTITUTIONAL INFANCY 

It will be time to review the growth of constitutional 
government in Japan when it has grown. But there 
is the birth of a Constitution, and there is perhaps its 
infancy. Possibly it is History, but at any rate it is 
a story. My view is that it is not so much the story 
of a birth as the story of an experiment in grafting. 
Japan, searching for plants of goodly medicinal uses in 
the garden of European institutions, chanced upon one 
of great reputed worth, and, fearful of omitting a salient 
ingredient from her dose of the syrup of modern civil- 
isation, she has cherished this seed of great repute with 
a design of extracting its saving essence in order to 
the just dispensation of the mixture. This, rather than 
the unnatural phenomenon of a birth without parental 
agency, is the story of the being of the Japanese 
Constitution. And we wait to witness or to hear of 
the ultimate action upon the Japanese body politic of 
the highly ingenious febrifuge brewed or distilled from 
the foundling plant. 

I have by me the story of the being of the Japanese 
Constitution, as told without metaphor by Marquis Ito, 
who is called its Father, doubtless because as mere 
Apothecary of the Constitution the Muse of History 



152 JAPAN 

might be less disposed to accord him ceremonious 
reception. And even as the wise father should best 
know his own child, Marquis Ito, in the character of 
Father of the Constitution, may well command more 
of the authority he deserves upon questions of its 
coming into being than should belong to him with 
only the precarious fame of a political apothecary to 
whom was assigned the task of distilling the essence 
of this herb of celebrated properties. To cross the 
threshold of the story — whatever its moral be — is to 
encounter Marquis Ito, and in this slight excursion 
into Japanese history the only fit chaperon is Marquis 
Ito. Accepting his chaperonage I abstract the story 
of the birth of the Japanese Constitution from an 
address which, after the practice of the Man who has 
made History, he delivered before his countrymen in 
Tokyo in April 1897 under the title, 'A Brief Review 
of the Events that led to the Promulgation of the 
Constitution.' 

' Having in 1868 made the Emperor the Emperor,' 
said Marquis Ito, in effect, on the occasion mentioned, 
'in 1 87 1 the Feudal System was with its own consent 
abolished, and we cast about what to do next.' He 
proceeds (I here quote him more fully) : * In the year 
preceding the abolition of the Feudal System — in 1870 
— a sort of National Assembly was summoned. But 
there was no clear definition of its legislative powers 
and it did nothing. We began to feel keenly the 
importance of obtaining a better and, more intimate 
knowledge of conditions in Western countries. It 
was decided to send an Embassy thither to the end 
of our enlightenment. I was one of the members of 
the Embassy. While we were away the Government 
was reorganised into two separate Councils — a legis- 



CONSTITUTIONAL INFANCY 153 

lative body and an executive. In 1873 the former 
began an Investigation into the question of establishing 
a National Assembly, but difficulties in Korea, threaten- 
ing war, Interposed. The Embassy returned from the 
West, and the Korean crisis being overpast, the year 
1873 witnessed the presentation to the Government of 
a now celebrated memorial urging the establishment of 
an elective assembly. The memorial simply asked for 
the summons of a popular assembly. It made not the 
slightest allusion to the nature of the Constitution under 
which the assembly was to play its part. Nor may we 
marvel at this omission, in view of the general standard 
of knowledge among our countrymen at that time 
as to the processes and phenomena of Parliamentary 
government. There were indeed some translations of 
English works on the subject, but they were incomplete 
and very Imperfect. The memorial was disapproved 
by the Government, and then we had an Insurrection, 
and an expedition to Formosa. In 1874 attention was 
again directed to questions of internal reform, and in 
January 1875 events had arranged the now historic 
conference of Osaka.' [Marquis Ito names the leaders 
of this conference, himself among the number.] ' The 
constitutional question formed the principal subject of 
discussion at the conference. We finally adjourned to 
Tokyo, where a committee was appointed to investi- 
gate the procedure best adapted for the inauguration 
of constitutional government. It was decided by way 
of preliminary steps to establish a Senate, a Court of 
Cassation, and an annual Conference of local Gover- 
nors. In the following year (1876) the Senate received 
orders to investigate the constitutional question. But 
another Insurrection ' [known as the Satsuma rebellion, 
1877] *left us with a financial crisis which for three 



154 JAPAN 

years excluded all other problems. Soon, however, 
another popular movement — doubtless the sequel chiefly 
of the spread of education — expressed itself in a clamour 
for the creation of a national Assembly. It was evident 
that a constitution must be granted. This was, indeed, 
the intention of the Imperial Government from the 
outset, and the question was settled by the celebrated 
Imperial Rescript of October 1881 announcing the 
opening of a Parliament in 1890.' 

It is a very short story. It is a mere anecdote to 
our tremendous serial running through the centuries 
from 1215 to 1832, with chapters still to be written. 
It is a model of condensation, compression, concen- 
tration — the compression of the history of six hundred 
years into a decade, with immense saving of national 
energy and marvellous economy of blood and treasure. 
With France, with England, with Europe in our eye, 
there is here all the semblance of a Miracle. The 
lineaments of that potent and mysterious grandeur are 
deceivingly complete. The shining example has the 
dazzling quality which some inner and inexplicable 
glory might reflect. The thing was even accomplished 
with miraculous ease, with that facility which is the 
most convincing witness of the achievement of the 
impossible. 

But the image has no life ! In eff*ect, the dead has 
not been raised. In efi^sct, its wan cheeks have only 
been painted, its facial muscles set twitching, as it were, 
by electric charge. In efi'ect, Japan, notwithstanding 
the miraculous vraisemhlance of her constitutional 
achievement, has not achieved in one decade or two 
that which we Westerns have barely accomplished in 
five centuries. Why, but the other day, Marquis Ito, 
Father of the Constitution, and lover of his child, 



CONSTITUTIONAL INFANCY 155 

talked mysteriously of alternatives to constitutional 
government, reassuring his hearers that none such 
were imagined in the rare circle in which he moves, 
but that, — with cryptic allusion and oratorical spur to 
the higher patriotism. * It is of course impossible,' 
said he, ' to bring all the members of the Diet to 
pursue one and the same policy, but at the same 
time, it is obvious that, unless affairs of state find 
some sort of solution through the discussions of the 
Diet, it will be impossible to continue the constitutional 
form of government.' 

To understand it one may do many things. One 
may read between the lines of the short historical 
narrative I have quoted out of the mouth of Marquis 
Ito, and thereby and therein understand it. One may 
reside in Japan for twenty years and know less about 
it at the end than at the beginning of the residence — 
less than nothing, that is to say. One may wait a 
hundred years, and watching Japanese history the 
while, get a very lucid idea of it. Anyhow, it is part 
of Japan, and therefore possibly quite normal. One 
can only, in a serious consideration of the matter, put 
it down to this, that the constitution in Japan is or 
was part of the general experiment with European 
institutions which constitutes the Japanese Revolution. 
The experiment, in floricultural simile, is one in 
grafting or acclimatisation. Marquis Ito, indeed, ac- 
knowledges a popular clamour for a popular Assembly. 
He adds significantly that it was the Imperial Govern- 
ment's intention from the outset to bring in a con- 
stitution. I will add, I believe more significantly, 
that a popular clamour in Japan is often a whim, a 
passing fever, a temporary excitement — nothing more 
than a clamour in fact, with its implication of elements 



156 JAPAN 

of impulse, ignorance, and some give -me -the -moon 
petulance. This is an indictment, but one remembers 
among many other things that during the campaign of 
1902 voters hung at their doors the placard: 'No 
admission to Parliamentary candidates.' The placard, 
as it is put, throws a flood of light on the matter. 

The indictment, indeed, charges no more than 
that Japan, the Japanese, politically are yet in their 
constitutional infancy, that they have not yet come to 
the manhood of liberty and political enlightenment — 
that they have not fought their way thither through 
blood or even with tears. There are fond pretensions — 
I might quote such — that this Asiatic land has already 
entered into the full inheritance of Freedom, that her 
eyes have seen the vision, both its substance and its 
shadow, that the sacred lamp is lit in her halls, never 
to be extinguished. There is even a belief of Europe 
that Japan has received baptism of the holy water of 
French Revolutions and English Reform Acts. Alas, 
the illusion ! Do we forget our servitude — the servi- 
tude of six centuries .? Is a year's popular clamour 
the servitude, or two years' ; or the clamour of a 
decade ? Is this all the blood and tears demanded by 
law inexorable ? Surely not — surely not, even in 
Japan, whose foremost man, the ' Father ' of the 
constitution, was saying a month or two since : 
' Unless . . . happens, it will be impossible to continue 
the constitutional form of government.' 

The Japanese electoral law convicts the land of 
constitutional infancy — less than a million, perhaps 
900,000, voters in a population of 44,000,000 or 
45,000,000 ; less than 2 electors per 100 inhabitants 
against England's 17, France's 28 ; less than 5 of 
every 100 adult males with a voice in the conduct of 



CONSTITUTIONAL INFANCY 157 

affairs, against England's 6^, and France's 85. And 
scan the statistics of offences in the ' campaign ' of 
1902. They were 418, implicating 1683 persons. 
You may have the particulars : — Bribery, 201 cases, 
implicating 266 persons ; corruption by ' tender of 
refreshments,' no cases, implicating 176 persons; 
corruption by the giving of presents, 30 cases, 38 
persons ; corruption by promise of profit, 1 1 cases, 

1 2 persons ; by promise of office, 3 cases, 9 persons ; 
by promise of personal aid — perhaps in the rice-field — 

1 3 cases, 1 7 persons ; intimidation, 2 cases ; other 
offences 47, implicating 66 persons. Hear this ' char- 
acter ' of the Japanese politician by a Japanese critic, 
possibly atrabilious, but nevertheless Japanese : ' The 
majority of Japanese politicians are insufficiently 
educated. Some are scarcely capable of understanding 
the purport of Bills introduced in the Diet. The 
majority are poor. They are not men of the character 
to carve out a position for themselves in the world, 
nor are they content with the prizes of petty official- 
dom. They therefore take to politics in prospect of 
a good reward with a minimum of labour. It is not 
surprising that they lack both party loyalty and public 
patriotism. Their game is intrigue and -chicanery, and 
the business of the State suffers accordingly. Parasite 
politicians, they resemble the outlaw robbers of the 
Japan of the old era. They roam around the political 
sea without aim save the seizure of any opportunity 
that may be turned to their own profit. They are 
active in the fomentation of agitation, and frequent 
disreputable quarters to brood upon their schemes. 
They are addicted to dissipation and sunk in cor- 
ruption. Their increasing number is an ominous sign 
of the times.' Said a leading Tokyo daily of the 



158 JAPAN 

typical candidate's methods in 1902 : 'A candidate 
spends from ;/^200 to £600. Where the money goes 
is not clear, unless the pockets of the ratepayers be 
its destination. The candidate's plan nowadays is 
to provide himself with a book in which he asks his 
promised supporters to write their names. The number 
of names thus entered often far exceeds the total 
number of registered electors, from which it is to be 
inferred that some voters carry their vote into as many 
markets as possible, and sell it to as many buyers as 
they can find.' Another daily of Tokyo, of equal or 
superior repute, had this note : * Candidates appear 
to see no reason why they should announce their 
political views or seek electoral support on the ground 
of identity of sentiment. They simply make personal 
appeals to the electors, and their importunity has in some 
places become a veritable nuisance.' Clinching these 
testimonies to the political infancy of the country there 
is — a void, a negation — the absence, namely, of protest 
from five or six million potential voters — as we would 
regard them — against their exclusion from franchise 
rights ; the placid acceptance by these millions of the 
supposed rule of less than a million of their com- 
patriots; the assent of 95 in 100 to the dominion of 
the remaining 5, who, perad venture, wear the jewel of 
political probity much too near the itching palm ; 
whose rule in consequence is not rule but only the 
sufficient excuse of an Oligarchy. 

Remembering the nobleness to which Japan might 
have risen in this affair — in the regimen of her political 
youth with the aid of the complete canon of conduct 
which she might have taken from the volumes of the 
History of Liberty in Europe ; imagining the lustre of 
the example which she, though Asiatic, might have 



CONSTITUTIONAL INFANCY 159 

set for Europe's Future ; trembling from the accusa- 
tion she might have hurled at Europe's Past ; hoping, 
now without hope, for a new Religion of Liberty to 
be written from the inspiration with which she might 
have been inspired — remembering, imagining, trembling, 
hoping, I find a certain pathos, a note of the tragedy 
of failure, some of the melancholy of the blight of a 
fair and bounteous prospect, in the confessions of a 
party manifesto sent out by Marquis Ito for the election 
of 1902 : — ' A healthy and judicious development of the 
body politic being the first requisite of national strength, 
our party must endeavour to secure progress based 
solidly on the terra firma of intellectual and material 
wealth. . . . Our party should devote special attention 
to the question of the education and the moral elevation 
of the people. ... In short, intellectual civilisation 
and material strength are the only means by which 
we can ensure the permanent attainment of our 
object. ... As regards the coming Election, I think 
it hardly necessary for me to point out to you that 
our party should aim at returning to the Diet as many 
as possible of the candidates who pin their faith to 
these principles, and who are at the same time of 
unimpeachable character and courageous and constant 
enough to remain true to their convictions. As 
to actual election methods . . . clean conduct, full 
freedom, and absolute good faith in all matters 
pertaining to the election being essential to the 
proper representation of the nation, our party should 
endeavour to avoid bringing any unlawful pressure 
or any improper influences to bear on the electors, 
and we should by our example try to prevent others 
from resorting to such reprehensible courses.' 

We shall imagine Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chamberlain, 



i6o JAPAN 

Lord Rosebery, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 
on an election eve, appealing to their followers to hold 
their hands from acts of corruption and unclean con- 
duct, and we shall mentally transport ourselves — 
whither, if not to our constitutional babyhood ? 
Marquis Ito's manifesto is a confession. The father 
of the constitution tells us that his country is in its 
constitutional swaddling-clothes. He would have it 
learn the alphabet of Liberty. And to think that it 
might have been giving us the religion ! 



XIX 

AN OLIGARCHY WITH EXCUSES 

It is, of course, very well with Japan if the ruling 
Oligarchy be sufficient. The exigent matter being that 
the rule, whether of despotism or the referendum, be 
right in relation to the appurtenant conditions, the 
Japanese Oligarchy is its own authority and justification 
if its action be the thing desiderated for the time being. 
And perhaps never was anOligarchy which could turn over 
the pages of history, and point to so complete an array 
of excuses, so sufficient for its existence and continuance. 
* You are curious about the validity of our status, you 
wish to examine our credentials,' this Oligarchy will 
say; 'read six pages of Japanese history since 1853, 
and be satisfied.' The ingenuous inquirer will read and 
will be satisfied. The Japanese Oligarchy is, in fact, the 
necessary corollary or complement of an Emperor who 
is still a god, and of an infant constitution. There is here 
a great hiatus which only the Oligarchy can fill. On 
the one hand, the theory and much of the reality of a 
divinity ; on the other, the fact of a people in their 
constitutional babyhood. It is manifest that between 
a divinity who may not deign to govern, and a demo- 
cracy which cannot if it would, the business of govern- 
ment in Japan is liable to fall upon chaos without the 
Oligarchy. Necessity is therefore the first mandate of 

161 M 



1 62 JAPAN 

the Oligarchy in Japan ; the history of the country 
since 1853 is its supplementary warrant, the satisfac- 
tion it is able to offer the inquiring person who has 
read about an autocratic Emperor and a constitutional 
system. 

Surely never was an Oligarchy with a stronger case. 
Necessity, let us concede, is the prime excuse of the 
power that is ; beneficent achievement the corner-stone 
of its authority. The necessity here is the people's 
constitutional infancy and the apotheosis of their 
Emperor. As to the achievement of the Oligarchy — 
its beneficent achievement — one might prove it simply 
by reference to the present status, credit, prestige, fame, 
lustre of Japan in the world's eye. Its achievement is 
the history, the creation, of modern Japan — no more, no 
less. The Oligarchy, or its members, when questioned, 
or on occasion of review of the historical facts, ascribe the 
achievement to the enlightenment, the wisdom, the in- 
fallibility of the Emperor, who is divine. ' I have done 
nothing,' says Marquis Ito, ' I could have done nothing. 
The Imperial wisdom has accomplished all things.' This, 
however, is the manner of the country ; the native speech 
for the occasion. It is rhetorical figure, so to speak ; 
it is in the manner of allusion ; it is almost metaphor. 
Listen to Marquis Ito's account of the abolition of 
feudalism, the first great achievement of the Japanese 
Oligarchy after its restoration of the Emperor to his 
ancient seat as Son of Heaven. This account is the 
first part of Marquis Ito's conspectus of the events 
which led to the introduction of quasi -constitutional 
forms in Japan — the conspectus which I have already 
quoted for partial proof of the constitutional infancy of 
the country. Says Marquis Ito : — 

' I would first call your attention to the period ante- 



AN OLIGARCHY WITH EXCUSES 163 

cedent to the abolition of the feudal system [1871 
backwards]. The idea of a constitution was as yet 
foreign to the minds of the leading men. The restora- 
tion of the powers of State then exercised by the Shogun 
to the Emperor was the political idea of that time.' 
[The Shogunate was an office of State which for nearly 
three centuries had been the actual empire of the State, 
wielded by a dynasty of Shogun sovereigns, with the 
real Emperor ruling a palace when he was not himself 
an infant under parental rule.] ' There even was not 
among the leading men any distinct notion as to what 
should be done with the feudal system. There was 
certainly no idea of its ultimate abolition. In the 
autumn of 1867 the anti-Shogunate movement came to 
a head. In the winter following the powerful feudal 
clans opposed to the pretensions of the Shogunate 
brought such pressure to bear upon the Shogun as 
induced him to abdicate and resign the ruling power 
into the hands of the Emperor, the legitimate sovereign. 
The restoration thus accomplished [1868], the incubus 
of feudalism yet lay upon the land ; the links that 
bound the feudal chiefs and their retainers were strong. 
I may venture to say that none as yet even dreamt of 
the possibility of the abolition of that form of polity. 
The minds of the political leaders were more immedi- 
ately occupied with the difficulty of harmonising and 
uniting the jarring interests and mutual rivalries of the 
powerful clans which had acted the principal parts in 
the drama of the Restoration. Out of this prime 
necessity of the time arose that now well-known formula, 
kogi^ public opinion, it being rightly judged by the 
leading statesmen that insistence on the importance 
of public opinion was the best check on the rivalries 
of the clans. In pursuance of this idea a conference of 



1 64 JAPAN 

leaders was called at Kyoto [the then capital of Japan]. 
This conference found its principal anxiety in the 
financial condition of the new government. I was at 
that time, in the spring of 1868, Governor of the city 
of Hyogo. One of the clan leaders, Kido, came to 
visit me there, troubling much about the financial 
difficulty. Pondering over the matter, the idea then 
came to me of the necessity — the imperative necessity 
— of abolishing the feudal system. I broached the idea 
to Kido. Cautioning me to say nothing further of it 
meanwhile, he hurried back to Kyoto, and soon after- 
wards left for Choshu to bring the idea to the notice of 
our feudal chiefs. [Marquis Ito is of the Choshu clan ; 
he was a member of its military class, a samurai.] The 
Prince approved the principle of the proposal, but 
strongly advised Kido to use every caution and circum- 
spection in carrying it out. This was the situation 
when an unexpected thing happened. A representation, 
embodying my own idea of the voluntary surrender of 
their fiefs by the feudal lords, was submitted to the 
Government by the lord of Himeji. Mystery enshrouds 
the original authorship of the document to this day. It 
had no immediate practical result. I myself then took 
action and made representations in support of the 
memorial, and my endeavours were soon powerfully 
assisted by the action of representatives of some of the 
leading clans, who voluntarily offered to restore the 
clan fiefs to the Imperial Government. Thus was 
accomplished the first step in the abolition of the feudal 
system in Japan. The loyalty, patriotism, and public 
spirit of the great feudal lords made possible the sacrifice 
of their rights. For a time they served as Governors 
of their respective clans, and in that capacity they still 
continued to be regarded as feudal chiefs by their former 



AN OLIGARCHY WITH EXCUSES 165 

vassals. Thus a semblance of feudalism was still main- 
tained. Its substance and shadow finally disappeared 
through the simple process [1871] of relieving the local 
chiefs of their governorships, and through the new 
division of the country into cities and prefectures with 
new governors. This completed the abolition of the 
feudal system in Japan, and was the first step in our 
advance towards a constitutional regime' 

Reading by the way, may we decline the invitation 
to admiration which Marquis Ito's commentary on the 
historical facts extends in these following sentences : — 
* I venture to observe that this peaceful abolition of 
feudalism is without a parallel in the history of the 
world. In other countries its disappearance was marked 
by disastrous commotions. In our case the change was 
effected without the shedding of a drop of human blood. 
That which peculiarly distinguished our case from that 
of other countries was the voluntary surrender of their 
fiefs by the feudal chiefs. The whole history of the 
transaction reveals a disinterested devotion to the 
Throne and to the country, which is the distinctive 
trait of the Japanese nation.' 

This, then, is part of the historical case for the 
Japanese Oligarchy ; part of its excuse ; part of the 
validity of its status. The rest of its case, besides 
necessity, is the history of Japan since the abolition of 
its feudalism in 1871, the history it has made with 
at least the consent, possibly with the approving co- 
operation, perhaps with the enthusiastic aid of the 
Emperor who is apotheosised. 

It is indeed possible that without the Emperor, 
without his existence, the Oligarchy could not have 
reared the structure of its splendid case in history 
and in the eyes of the world. After all, there is, and 



1 66 JAPAN 

always has been, a Japanese nation, a nation which, 
however constitutionally incompetent, in the mass 
privately believes in itself and publicly in its Emperor. 
The nation's consent to the abolition of feudalism was 
not asked. If that sublime immolation is to be held the 
phoenix birth of the modern Japan, then the Japanese 
Oligarchy accomplished the beginning of things alone, 
of its own inspired initiative. But the historical 
case of the oligarchical chiefs, after the disappearance 
of feudalism, acquires some of its validity from their 
own consistent profession that it is not their case, 
but the case of the Imperial wisdom and enlighten- 
ment. This profession is made, has been made, 
voluntarily by the Oligarchy, and the nation has not 
interfered with the Oligarchy because the Oligarchy 
has never claimed to be what it is ; the nation has been 
satisfied to assume that the Emperor has been the 
Oligarchy ; it has consented to an historic illusion, 
and the Emperor has accepted the homage due to the 
miraculous works of the Oligarchy, the members of 
which, knowing on their part that the nation is aware 
of their humanity, recognise the hopelessness, in what- 
ever circumstances, of divine honours coming to them, 
even if the miraculous works be, in reality, theirs alone. 
The Japanese, you will perceive, are thoroughly Oriental. 
They argue the facts by supposing a case. 

The outsider, desiring to apprehend the phenomenon 
known as Modern Japan, will encounter the facts, one 
of which is that Japan's modern history is chiefly the 
patriotism, the enlightenment, the original genius, the 
trained intellect, and the splendid self-sacrifice of a 
group of leading men ; that that history is, in short, 
the warrant of the Oligarchy, which to this day and 
at this hour shapes the country's ends, promotes its 



AN OLIGARCHY WITH EXCUSES 167 

progress, and fosters its best activities. Yet withal it 
acknowledges an obligation to clothe its magnificent 
achievements in a cloak of Imperial purple. The 
Japanese, like the rest of us, hug illusions. They are 
fond of symbols. 

Yet the Oligarchy, let it be understood, is sanctioned 
beyond the sanctions of necessity and its historical 
achievement. It is recognised. Necessity has hitherto 
been its primary sanction, but for a generation past it 
has been unofficially recognised, under a name, the 
translation of which is usually made ' the Elder States- 
men ' — the * Genro,' in Japanese. This means, the 
mere title means, that in addition to the sanctions of 
necessity and their achievements, the Elder Statesmen 
have much authority from their mere relation to Japan's 
past. These men — Marquis Ito, Marquis Yamagata, 
Count Inouye, and the rest of them — have no parallel 
types among the statesmen of the civilised world. 
They have not only seen the Feudal Age ; they have 
been administrators under a feudal polity. They have 
governed in the early Middle Ages ; they are now 
Statesmen of the Twentieth Century. And the Japanese 
people, their compatriots, allow them the respect which 
is due to this unique fame. The sanctions of the 
Genro, of the Oligarchy which rules in Japan, rest on 
a triply solid foundation — the necessity of the case ; 
the beneficence of their historical achievement, and 
the distinction of a record of rule which has no 
parallel in the personal histories of their contemporary 
statesmen of the world at large. 

The total effect of the Oligarchy, of the position, 
acquired and sanctioned, of this unofficial council of 
wise men of the realm, is what I have before described : 
their rule means that the best political minds, the best 



1 68 JAPAN 

available statesmanship of the country, is at the back 
of every important act and decision of the Government 
of Japan for the time being. There is the coincidental 
effect that the Government for the time being is not 
the Government — not the Government of the constitu- 
tion ; but this is unimportant until the country — the 
Revolution — grows out of its constitutional childhood. 



XX 

PARTY POLITICS PRO FORMA 

Let the country's constitution be no more than an 
excuse for the ruling Oligarchy, you yet find that in 
Japan you need not be deprived of the amusement of 
party politics. In a way they are as interesting as the 
party politics of England ; in their own way, with their 
own background of Japanese history, they are more so, 
or diiferently. I mean no disrespect in saying that 
they are often something besides interesting ; that they 
are amusing. This is the same as to say that they are 
the party politics of the Revolution. It is more of a 
fault that the party politics of Japan are terribly con- 
fusing to the outsider who tries to understand them. 
The ordinary outsider is usually content to be interested 
and amused ; he rightly stops short at understanding. 
I have heard of one qualified outsider, resident in Japan 
from the time they began to have political parties there. 
He went into the subject with some thoroughness : 
party origins, party cleavages, party politics, party 
leaders, causes of the disappearance of parties and of 
the rise of the parties which succeeded the defunct — 
the whole subject. This outsider was not overwhelmed 
in the midst of his inquiry. Only he confessed that 
at the end of it all, at the end of twenty or twenty- 
five years' study of Japanese political parties, he under- 

169 



1 70 JAPAN 

stood less about them than he did at the beginning. 
So it is not without reason that the stranger may lay 
this fault to the charge of Japanese politicians — the 
charge that their politics and their parties are con- 
fusing. I have written enough to exempt the Oligarchy 
from the charge, but the Oligarchy is not the politics 
or the parties of Japan. The Oligarchy is the Govern- 
ment, and easily understood. It is another question 
with the country's politics, with its parties. When 
after long study one arrives at some slight proficiency 
in their esotericisms, and when, upon the basis of this 
proficiency, one tries to settle privately in one's own 
mind what the whole caboodle means, the reflec- 
tion — it can scarcely be an opinion — into which one's 
impressions subside or crystallise, as embodying the 
only feasible formula, is in this wise : — ' The Oligarchy 
says, has said, to itself and the politicians, " We, you, 
will play at party politics and the constitutional idea in 
order to find out if they are practicable ; in the mean- 
while we will manage the country's affairs." ' * Let us 
have lay figures at first,' the Japanese politicians say to 
each other ; ' afterwards we will have real parties if it's 
worth while. Let us meanwhile play the game with 
counters ; afterwards the stakes may be in gold.' And 
the game is played, with immense zest ; sometimes 
even with such gravity and appearance of conscious 
responsibility that one is tempted to think it is being 
played for honest gold — tempted until an interlude of 
Comedy or Farce breaks the spell. And yet by way 
of qualification, by way of justice, let it be said that 
many of the players seem to be imbued all the while 
with the consciousness that it may not, that in fact it 
cannot always be a game ; that by and by it must be 
the real thing, battle and fury and blood ; that the 



PARTY POLITICS PRO FORMA 171 

game is the opportunity and the time to win the 
coming battle. With these, perhaps, the game is 
already the battle. 

The process of government in Japan, the actual 
management of the State's business, its policy, its 
necessary policy, at home and abroad, is, let it be 
repeated, easily understood. There is really but one 
foreign policy and but one possible domestic policy. 
Politicians — groups of politicians, ' caves ' of them — 
may espouse other policies, but these always are and 
always remain minor and subordinate policies. The 
Elder Statesmen — the ruling Oligarchy, as I have named 
them — are the peculiar sponsors of the home and 
foreign policy, because with them originated the ideas 
which preceded the home policy, and because their 
political careers have been contemporaneous with the 
appearance and growth of the circumstances which have 
been father to the foreign policy. Each successive 
Cabinet is either dominated as to its actual personnel by 
the Oligarchy or, when times of crisis threaten the home 
or the foreign policy, is ruled or overruled by the 
Oligarchy's extra-official advice. The Oligarchy, that is 
to say, has unintermittent charge over the home and 
foreign policy. In other words, it rules. This is the 
process of government in Japan. It is not impossible 
to understand it. But there is the future, the time 
when the last of the Elder Statesmen and their political 
children shall have been gathered to his fathers ; the 
time when Japan's policy may not be the policy to be 
taken for granted that it is now ; a time when the 
Japanese people may themselves be capable of politics, 
educated in the worthy and eminent uses of a real con- 
stitution. This future, this time to come, is, you might 
suppose, adumbrated in the country's party politics 



172 JAPAN 

which amuse. It is as an adumbration of the future, a 
possible future, that they interest ; it is perhaps because 
they are an adumbration that they are inexplicable, 
incomprehensible to the outsider. The Oligarchy is 
looking to the future when it says, ' Let us all, all you 
members of the Diet together with ourselves, play at 
party politics while we, the Oligarchy, run the State.' 
Being wise men they recognise that party politics may 
in time come to mean the government of the State ; as 
patriots they seem to desire to see the system which is 
to succeed them proved, tested, adapted — if only pro 
forma or even pour rire — before they abdicate. So the 
politicians play at parties and party politics with the 
encouraging approval of the Council of Elders which 
rules, and with a zest of their own which, though often 
the mere exuberance of the gamester, seems not seldom 
to be the serious intent of the neophyte in training for 
the mortal struggles of the amphitheatre — a mixture 
of metaphor which is quite applicable to the case, let 
me say. 

Conscious, perhaps, that their party politicians 
succeed too well in being grotesque, because their 
politics are merely a sort of play as yet, Japanese 
publicists sometimes deprecate the stranger's smile with 
the observation that it is not necessary to believe that 
in its evolution in Japan, representative government 
shall inevitably assume the form and body of the party 
system. ' In other directions we have proved the 
fallibility of History,' they say, ' why not in this ? ' 
And truly why not } They propose, these marvellous 
masters of legerdemain, to produce the Goddess of 
Liberty from the narrow circuit and the shallow 
capacity of a divine Emperor's crown ; why not repre- 
sentative, responsible, popular government without 



PARTY POLITICS PRO FORMA 173 

political parties ? At present our reply is merely this, 
— that for a country which proposes to cry stinking fish 
on the party system Japan has quite an extraordinary, 
nay quite a prodigious, array of parties. And on the 
basis of this intention of Japan's political evolution 
what becomes of the game ? If, gentlemen, the game 
be not a training and exercise for a fight to come, are 
we not asked, do you not ask us, to view a performance 
of burlesque ? It is not, then, the jousting lists we look 
upon, but pantomime. 

Consider briefly some history of Japanese politics. 
Hear a Japanese description of the party situation, 
luminous with the voluntary revelations of a confes- 
sion, lifting the veil upon a scene in the lists or the 
vaudeville stage, as you care to interpret it. ' The 
common malady of all the political parties in Japan,' says 
the Japan Times, of Tokyo, speaking its Japanese editor's 
mind, ' is the want of cohesion and the consequent 
tendency to disruption whenever questions of importance 
offer the least opportunity for difference of views or 
conflict of interests. In their early formative stages, 
when the members are comparatively few in number, 
they usually appear to promise a wholesome develop- 
ment. But as soon as they reach a certain stage of 
growth they inevitably show unmistakable symptoms of 
the constitutional disease above alluded to. Either the 
leaders quarrel among themselves or the rank and file 
become dissatisfied with the leaders, and a party which 
it has taken years to organise splits into several small 
insignificant groups. . . . This peculiar state of affairs 
is the result of a multitude of causes. . . . There is 
first the prevalence of the spirit of provincialism among 
our politicians. When disintegration takes place in a 
party it usually happens that the disintegrated elements 



174 JAPAN 

group themselves on some local geographical basis.' 
[Much as if the members for Lancashire might secede 
from their respective organisations and form a Con- 
servative-Liberal party.] * On the recent disruption of 
the Liberal party, for instance, a portion of the seceders, 
coming from the eight provinces around Tokyo, formed 
a separate party, while those from the north-east are 
reported to have in contemplation the organisation of 
another local group. Tosa [a province in southern 
Japan] being the cradle, and for a long time the strong- 
hold of the Jiyu-to [one of the historic parties], it is 
but natural that men from that locality should form the 
nucleus and backbone of the party. On the other hand, 
the politicians from the Kwanto districts in the north- 
east do not like being left out in the cold. . . . 
Another factor [in the phantasy of parties] is the 
instinct of hero-worship. Hero-worship is the most 
distinctive feature of the Japanese character. Like the 
habit of provincial jealousy it is the product of our 
national history. ... " Better be a cock's head than a 
bull's tail " is the motto deeply imprinted in the minds 
of the petty heroes of the political world. . . . [The 
situation therefore is that], in the meanwhile the 
country will have to be contented with a makeshift 
arrangement like the one now in existence, a sort of 
mixture of clan [meaning oligarchical] and party 
government' 

This is a writing of 1897, but it is in fact a very 
precise account of the behaviour and deportment of the 
Japanese party politicians of to-day in the game they 
play. Hear the fine candour of the same editor in the 
following year, 1898 : — * It will not be far from the 
mark to observe that nobody is more keenly alive to 
the fact than the party leaders themselves, that ninety- 



PARTY POLITICS PRO FORMA 175 

nine out of every hundred of their followers are entire 
strangers to an intelligent knowledge of party politics 
in their practical working.' About the very time of 
this comprehensive indictment came a sign in the sky, 
hailed as a very signal of the New Era by this very 
editor among others — the Era whose beginning should 
be the end of the play, the hour when the Oligarchy 
should say : ' Our period has closed ; the Party System 
and the Constitutional Idea are one, and henceforth 
practicable.' 'The year 1898,' says the editor I have 
quoted, * has been in many respects one of the most 
remarkable in the modern history of Japan. . . . 
Events demonstrated that a Cabinet independent of 
parties had been rendered impossible by the march of 
political events. ... A decided advance has been made 
in the political development of Japan. The bold and 
timely resolution adopted by Marquis Ito in June 
dealt a final blow at the system of clan (oligarchical) 
government, and gave an immense impetus to the intro- 
duction of government by party.' What, you ask, was 
this sign from Heaven, this portent of excellent omen 
in the political firmament .'' This is the story of its 
appearance and aspect. At the beginning of the year 
there was no Government — the Ministry of Count 
Matsukata had just resigned. Marquis Ito was sum- 
moned. Upon failure of other alternatives he formed 
the usual Cabinet of friends and relatives, with the 
Oligarchy in the background. The ' opinion of the 
country ' was taken, but no single party secured even 
a crazy majority. ' Immediately after dissolving the 
House,' says the account just quoted, ' Marquis Ito set 
about forming a political party of his own, but in this 
attempt he was powerfully opposed by the senior clan 
statesmen and, seeing no other way of extricating the 



176 JAPAN 

country from its peculiar trouble, he advised the 
Emperor to summon the Opposition political leaders, 
Count Okuma and Count Itagaki, whose parties had 
just been amalgamated. Thus was formed on June 
30th [1898] the first party Government in Japan.' 
This is the story of the apparition of Japan's second 
political Labarum, the second after the Constitution. 
It was the apparition of an hour. In four months, we 
read, the ' historical jealousy' of parties rent the Cabinet 
in twain. A Government of Elder Statesmen quickly 
restored the regime of the Oligarchy, which still endures, 
so solidly based it seems, that the present Government 
of Count Katsura has been in power since the summer 
of 1 90 1, without any support save the consent of the 
Oligarchy to its existence, secured by consent on its 
part to the Oligarchy's real rule. But the politicians 
continue to play at parties, and the philosophical 
radicals of the country continue to hope that some day 
soon parties will govern. 

Is it not, then, just to say that Japanese politicians 
have as yet only played with or at party politics } 
What is the historical meaning of a picture which is a 
dissolving view of parties, a phantasmagoria, a kaleido- 
scopic procession of them, if it be not that the 
politicians concerned as yet but play at party politics ? 
There are doubtless sufficient explanations, complete 
excuses of the fact, but the fact itself is the matter of 
moment. Put away then the delusion that Japan, if it 
has a constitution, if it has parties, party chiefs, party 
organisations, theories of party loyalty, and even a 
political enlightenment that might support an a priori 
assumption of the successful operation of the party 
system, — put away the delusion that therefore there is 
party government in Japan. It is above all things 



PARTY POLITICS PRO FORMA 177 

unsafe to argue from the premises in Japan or of Japan. 
He gains a fact about Japan who realises that party- 
politics do not there mean party government. Up to 
date they have meant a diversion, a sort of amusement, 
— this, but let us by no means say a folly. To-day's 
foolishness in Japan may be to-morrow's truth, reality, 
pith of life. 



XXI 

THE GRAND EXPERIMENT 

The Japanese Constitution is to be esteemed the boldest 
experiment of the Japanese Revolution and the ap- 
proved success of the Constitution would have been, 
or will be, its greatest achievement. 

Hitherto the Constitution is the great, the con- 
spicuous failure of the Revolution. Born it has been, 
but still-born. If one is to presume or to prescribe a 
natural order or progressive category of experiments 
for such an enterprise as the Europeanisation of Japan, 
the proportionate importance of the Constitutional 
experiment is measurable by its proportionate success. 
If the degree of success be practically nil in relation to 
all others of the series of experiments which compose 
the total enterprise, it is proved that the Constitution is 
the highest flight of the soaring effort of this unique 
People. One may reason further. If Japan be typical 
of Asia — if at heart she is Asia, and if her Revolution 
shall have registered some points of success in the use 
of all others the great institutions of modern European 
statehood, the single exceptional failure of the constitu- 
tional polity in a manner proves that this institution is 
in a special sense foreign to the Asiatic idea, that its 

178 



THE GRAND EXPERIMENT 179 

uses are in particular opposition to the preconceptions 
and prejudices of the Asiatic state system. 

Asia's history proves as much ; there is there positive 
testimony to the grave assumption that underlies the 
comparative failure of the Constitution in Japan. This 
failure is a redoubtable fact in evidence of Japan's 
affinity to Asia, of her identity with Asia. And so a 
new light is thrown upon the grandeur, the hazard, the 
courageous empiricism of the Revolution, its fine con- 
tempt of precedent, its fundamental faith in the efficacy 
and ultimate effect of European Reason upon the deep 
and strong -founded obstructions of race-origins and 
race-evolutions. The Revolution is admirable from its 
having placed a Constitution upon its programme ; it is 
not less, but more admirable because its Constitution is 
so far its most notorious futility. An instantly success- 
ful Constitution — an immediate or, as it were, natural 
habituation to the duties, the privileges, the uses of a 
constitutional polity by the Japanese people — would have 
been strong assurance of the necessity, or, as it were, 
the naturalness of the Revolution in Japan. The world 
would then have beheld no wonder, no miracle, in 
Japan. The Revolution would have been the order of 
events, and the New Era merely the logical morrow of 
a premised yesterday. The failure of the Constitution 
is a great fact in support of the pretensions of Modern 
Japan to be classed outwith the natural history of 
politics — that is to say, as a phenomenon. Others, her 
great experiments in European civilisation, being partial 
or complete successes, this conspicuous failure is index 
of the enormous significance of the successes. 

Nevertheless, by legitimate extension of this reason- 
ing, it is necessary to believe and to affirm that only 
upon the ultimate success of the existing Constitution, 



i8o JAPAN 

or another, can the Revolution be firmly established, or 
proffered for the inspection of the world, a fact accom- 
plished and sufficient. 

One implication of the interpretation just given of 
Japan's Constitutional failure is this, of course, that no 
Constitution would have been or could have been an 
instant success. 

There can be no impeachment of the framer of the 
Japanese Constitution for his failure to make a Con- 
stitution which would have been an immediate and 
complete success. The question is whether his Con- 
stitution has had as much success as any other would 
have had ; whether, in fact, it was the perfect Constitu- 
tion for the imperfect conditions. And this question is 
one which no outsider could possibly debate in all its 
bearings, or debate at all with any hope of profit. We 
of Europe can only refer to Reason. The psychic, the 
sociological, the political symptoms which Marquis Ito 
was required to survey when he went to work upon his 
Constitution must have been the profound and vital 
crisis of his task. Not knowing them, incapable of 
knowing them, we can only ask whether, in accord with 
the spirit of the Japanese Revolution at large, he applied 
to them the touchstone of Reason ; whether Reason 
was the acid he employed to precipitate the esoteric 
solutions of the Japanese-Asiatic character in its relation 
to politics. 

Taken upon this flank, assailed by this artillery, 
Marquis Ito's Constitution is scarcely impregnable. It 
is, in fact, a house of cards, if not a fabric of smoke. 

From of old, from ' ages eternal,' as the Constitution 
affirms, the Japanese Emperor has been a god. He is 
the descendant and representative of the Sun-Goddess, 
Ama-Terasu, heir as well of her divinity as of the 



THE GRAND EXPERIMENT i8i 

Japanese realm over which she was placed in illustrious 
authority by Izanagi, the divine author of being. The 
Japanese Emperor is to this day a god. Said a genial 
French father, of a quarter of a century's residence in 
Japan, to me of his work : ' Yes, their Mikado is a god, 
and our proposition to them of a God supreme over all 
is an offence to his divinity.' 

Now, there also was and is, in Japan, the aboriginal 
Asiatic inaptitude for the constitutional polity. Or, dis- 
allowing this if you wish, there was at any rate the Feudal 
Age, not a score of years abolished by Imperial Decree. 

Did ever a like situation confront a Constitution- 
maker .'' 

There was an Emperor-god, and a People who, while 
yet they had not learned, as they could not have learned, 
save by a miracle like the gift of tongues, the alphabet 
of free politics, demanded a Constitution, after, possibly 
because, they had been spontaneously promised one. 

Would the Emperor consent, was it proper that he 
should consent, even if he would, to resign his divinity ? 
Should the eyes of the People be opened ? Could their 
eyes, if opened, bear the withering light } Even if it 
were proper that the veil should be rent asunder, was the 
time fit, with the Feudal Age scarce a score of years 
gone by, and the huge eruption of the Revolution 
flooding the land with a welter of new, overwhelming 
ideas ^ 

Marquis Ito describes his dilemma. ' I had the 
great honour,' he says, ' to receive His Majesty the 
Emperor's orders to draw up a Constitution. I decided 
to study the Constitutional systems of Europe on the 
spot. So I left Japan for Europe in the spring of 1882. 
I felt very keenly the difficulties of the task assigned to 
me. The point which caused me greatest anxiety was 



1 82 JAPAN 

how to frame a Constitution which should not jeopardise 
the integrity of the Imperial polity of Japan. The 
question was how to harmonise monarchical principles 
with liberal ideas. The great American statesmen 
engaged in framing the Constitution of the United 
States encountered a great difficulty in the fact of there 
being no precedent available for their guidance in lay- 
ing down fundamental laws for a Democracy on such 
a large scale as theirs. I was placed in a similarly 
awkward situation though of an opposite kind. I 
believe that I have endeavoured to preserve intact the 
prerogatives of the Throne.' 

Marquis Ito mentions ' monarchical principles ' and 
the ' prerogatives of the Throne,' but these must be 
euphemisms. His Constitution is quite candid. Article 
III. is : ' The Emperor is sacred and inviolable,' and in a 
book of ' Commentaries ' by himself on his own Con- 
stitution, Article III. is extended by Marquis Ito with 
this comment : ' The Emperor is Heaven -descended, 
divine and sacred. He is pre-eminent above all His 
subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable.' 
On the Emperor's birthday in Japan, officials, from Pre- 
fectural Governors — perhaps from Prime Minister, 
though this I do not aver — to office-boy, bow before 
His Majesty's portrait. It is the act, though the act 
may not always be in the spirit, of adoration. You 
may not look upon a passing member of the Imperial 
House in Japan from the elevation of a doorstep. 
You may not even raise a cheer as Royalty passes by 
in its carriage or jinrikisha. The Mayor of a great 
Japanese seaport where there is a community of a 
thousand Europeans and Americans, in a table of ' in- 
structions ' to persons ' entitled ' to witness the passage 
of the Emperor through the local railway station a year 



THE GRAND EXPERIMENT 183 

ago, includes these among the instructions as to conduct': 
' The most respectful attitude for those welcoming 
His Majesty is to stand upright, with hands hanging 
down, eyes downcast and head forward, without a 
movement ; ' ' No comforter or umbrella may be used; ' 
* Smoking is strictly prohibited, nor may a cigarette be 
placed behind the ear.' A year ago a lecturer in ethics 
in a Tokyo school, teaching from an English professor's 
text-book, suggested that regicide is not always unjusti- 
fiable. 'There are some acts,' said he, * which are justi- 
fiable if their motive be good.' Government required 
his resignation and cancelled a privilege of the school 
under which its graduates were qualified to teach in 
Government secondary schools. The cancellation was 
made retrospective. Some years since a Minister of 
Education, desiring to stigmatise the increasing mean- 
ness of his countrymen's ideals, declared that if Japan 
should ever become a republic its first president would 
be a millionaire. The remark escaped him, and his 
resignation shortly followed. 

Marquis Ito's Constitution in theory affirms a divine 
Emperor, and in practice requires acts of adoration. 
The People acquiesce without knowledge — that is, 
they are left to undisturbed possession of their old 
ideas about emperors. The generosity of the Consti- 
tution refuses to deprive them of a god. They are 
not even enfranchised. Some, though without votes, 
may suspect, but they acquiesce. Many, who have 
votes, know, and they sometimes speak, but afterwards 
they acquiesce, in the official apotheosis. 

No Constitution could have been a success from its 
birth — by reason of Japanese origins ; but is it clear 
that the Revolution, represented by Marquis Ito, drew 
a Constitution as near as possible perfect for the im- 



1 84 JAPAN 

perfect conditions ? Should the Emperor have thrown 
away his mantle of sacrosanctity ? Should he have con- 
sented to come down to earth and be a man ? Were 
the People prepared, are they prepared, to give up a 
god without tears or worse ? Was it proper or fit that 
one party to the great covenant should be required to 
relinquish Heaven and the other their hope of it ? 

You smile at these queries associated with a political 
Constitution of the penultimate decade of the nineteenth 
century. So do I, but they express the situation. So 
extraordinary a thing is the Japanese Revolution ! 

We of Europe are not competent to investigate all 
the questions which the Japanese Constitution raises. 
I at least am not. For instance, I do not know if the 
Japanese people, with their mysterious Oriental origins 
and evolutions, were or are fit to bear up against the 
shock of a Constitution which should suddenly disclose 
to them that one of their gods eats rice day by day, the 
while they had fondly supposed that he dined exclusively 
on ambrosia. 

What I know is that, in conscience, I for one do 
not here admire the Revolution. I am not able to say 
in what degree it has gone wrong. I know only that 
it has here departed from my ideal of Reason, from its 
own ideal of Reason, pursued in other high affairs with 
a zeal at once admirable and effectual. Reason loved 
and entreated, has achieved miracles for the Revolution. 
Here, spurned or coldly ignored, she is revenged by a 
fantastic futility which, if the conspiracy of deep and 
enduring phenomena must have rendered great part 
of its failure in any event unavoidable, might, I am 
persuaded, have been shorn of part of its foolishness 
if its authors had more candidly invoked and more 
freely used the counsels of Reason. 



THE GRAND EXPERIMENT 185 

I do not here admire the Revolution : that is, I 
admire its constitutional experiment, but upon the one 
test which I can apply to it — the test which the Revolu- 
tion by its achievement authorises — I do not admire the 
' history ' of this experiment, the choice of constituents, 
nor their co-relation and disposition. 

It is sometimes said in Japan of Marquis Ito and 
the Oligarchy which righteously rules without a shred 
of authority from the Constitution — their rule being 
part of the Constitution's failure — it is said of the 
Oligarchy that be the theory of the Constitution on the 
Emperor's position what it may, and the practice under 
it, on the same question, what it is, they, the Oligarchy, 
being patriots and believers in the Revolution to its 
last purpose and effect, will prepare the way, are 
preparing the way, for the great coming time, the time 
of truly free, representative, constitutional politics. 
This is a hard saying. It means that the Japanese 
Emperor will sacrifice, first his divinity, afterwards 
his divine right. And the Constitution is written. 
Its seventy-third Article says : ' When it has become 
necessary in future to amend the provisions of the 
present Constitution a project to that effect shall be 
submitted to the Imperial Diet by Imperial Order,' and 
Marquis Ito's appurtenant ' commentary ' is : ' The 
Constitution has been personally determined by His 
Majesty the Emperor in conformity with the instruc- 
tions transmitted to him by his ancestors, and he desires 
to bequeath it to posterity as an immutable code of 
laws, whose provisions his present subjects and their 
descendants shall obey for ever. Therefore, the essen- 
tial character of the Constitution shall undergo no 
alteration.' Take an instance of Marquis Ito's inter- 
pretation for practice of his Constitution. In March 



1 86 JAPAN 

1 90 1 a no -confidence vote was moved against his 
Government in the House of Representatives. Marquis 
Ito gave the proposers this piece of his mind and 
Constitution : ' I suppose the object of the introducers 
of the Resolution is to demand the Cabinet's resignation. 
[Cries of ' Yes, yes.'] But I have been favoured with 
a renewed assurance of the Imperial confidence, and I 
desire to say that even if the Resolution is passed by the 
House I shall not leave my post so long as I enjoy the 
Imperial confidence. If the proposers are serious in 
trying to compass my resignation, I might recommend 
them to replace the Resolution by an Address to the 
Throne, for it is only through the Emperor that I can 
be removed from office.' 

On the whole, the farther you read the less you 
like the ' history ' of the greatest experiment of the 
Revolution. 

It leaves, it has left, the cardinal vexation of the 
pre-constitutional time, of all pre-constitutional times, 
untouched, unsolved. Not only so, it has left that 
cardinal vexation in the extraordinary shape which it 
had assumed in Japan because of the Emperor's divine 
descent. In Europe long ago it was the struggle of 
the King's divine right with the man's natural right. 
In Japan the terms are the divinity of a god and the 
prostration of his adorers. The terms are these even 
to this day of the Revolution. Is Reason, supreme 
over all gods, preparing a dies irae for revenge of 
her spurning .? Or is this day of blank constitutional 
failure a sufficient day of wrath } Remember that the 
Revolution must succeed in this affair or fail utterly. 



XXII 

CHAOS AND AN A B C POLICY 

Some ten minutes' walk or less in a westerly direction 
from Shimbashi Station, Tokyo — at which your train 
from Yokohama lands you — will take you into that 
part of the Japanese capital which is Paris in embryo — 
the materialisation of the New Era in stone and lime, 
and tree- lined drives. To reach this district you 
naturally cross a mediaeval moat on a crazy pile bridge : 
this is Tokyo, and Tokyo is the centre of the Revolu- 
tion. Then you pass some low brick houses like 
Camberwell tenements, and again a long, large, strange 
lodging, vulgarly European to the first story, thence 
upwards ancient Japanese ; fantastic, grotesque, incon- 
gruous, but successful as a presentment in wood and 
plaster of a fantastic time. You proceed, and in a 
minute you open up a generous prospect of drives 
three chains wide, skirting the blithe, grassy, unob- 
structed levels ot a park, backed in the distance by the 
clean, square, white-and-red elevations of brick-granite 
buildings, imported from Whitehall, and touched up 
with American improvements in transit. This is very 
bright, hopeful, inspiriting. You walk on, along the 
drive before you, and at fifty yards more you have on 
one side a natty, spick-and-span, point device villa, with 

187 



1 88 JAPAN 

a pinafore of trim, plotted, shrubby lawn, and a girdle 
of stone-and -spike fence broken, or buckled, by a 
stone -post gate. On the other side of the drive, 
opposite or nearly opposite this villa, there is — a 
prison ; or it might be a nobleman's stables ; or his 
kennels ; or even a congeries of decayed chapels of ease. 
It is, in fact, the Japanese Houses of Parliament until 
the Japanese Lords and Commons can begin business 
in the new Houses which have for some time past been 
building in the air, but, owing to shallow Japanese 
coffers and many pressing demands on them, have not 
so far found a site on earth. ' The building,' writes a 
friend of mine, whose epithets excuse my own, * is 
simply deplorable, and quite unworthy of the position 
which Japan now occupies among the nations. It would 
indeed be scornfully rejected as the legisaltive habitation 
of a provincial parliament in Canada or Australia.' 

Well, well, there is a Japanese Navy not far away 
which, I suppose, can clear for action at a moment's 
notice ; therefore there are these Japanese Barns of 
Parliament. 

And even so, to me they shall forsooth be ennobled, 
or at least excused, by the grand, the unique experi- 
ment which for three months of a Parliamentary session 
is conducted within them. The glory of the experiment, 
its daring, its hazard, the vast and pregnant issues which 
hang upon its success or its failure, make these Barns of 
Parliament in Kojimachi, Tokyo, as it were, a House 
of God. Or, in another view, is it not prudent to 
wait until there is a Japanese Parliament before you 
desiderate a Palace for its Habitation .? There is a 
Temple of Liberty, but there is no sacred shrine of 
Pantomine. 

Here, under these roofs — ' deplorable and quite 



CHAOS AND AN A B C POLICY 189 

unworthy ' — meets the Japanese Diet for three months 
from the first or second week of December. At the 
opening, in the Peers' Chamber, there is the Emperor 
with an Imperial Speech breathing sacrosanctity the 
while it affects to be a King's Speech pronouncing the 
legislative programme of a People's Government. The 
Japanese press gallery imagines how the Emperor looks 
in the delivery of his Speech : abutments are cunningly 
contrived to hide him from the bodily and vulgar eye of 
the press gallery, so its mind's eye is requisitioned. A 
cloud of Dignities accompanies the Emperor and, the 
Speech ended, moves swiftly thence with him. Some 
say he and they are the only dignities of the Japanese 
Diet, and unquestionably the deliberations of the Lower 
House are often a riot, or, at any rate, its noise. The 
member has his desk ; on its face there is a metal plate, 
hung upon a peg. It bears a number — the member's. 
When the member wishes to speak, he uses his plate as 
a clapper : thus he catches the Speaker's ear. With it 
he also protests. Denominated to speak, he mounts 
a rostrum — part of the French contribution to the 
Japanese Parliamentary Mosaic — and speaks, commonly 
with vehemence, on occasion with prudence, sometimes 
with wisdom. If the Japanese General Election be a 
funeral, the Japanese House of Commons is by way of 
being a wake. Nevertheless, along with the Japanese 
House of Peers, it accomplishes astounding feats of 
legislation per session. In its tenth, 1896-97, 121 
'projects of law' were 'presented,' 62 by the Govern- 
ment, 2 by the Upper House, and 57 by the House 
of Representatives. Of the total 5 1 were passed. In 
the ninth the total presented was 162, with 93 passed. 
There is alike a maximum of work and a maximum 
of talk in the Japanese Parliament. This Legislature, 



190 JAPAN 

judged bv its success in making Ia\\-s, is among the 
most remarkable in the world. In three months it gets 
through a programme which would consume haJt-a- 
dozen Westminster sessions. It does this bv referrinar 

o 

all Bills to committees, and accepting or rejecting the 
committee's report. Doing this, it achieves a success 
that might seem to excuse all its failure. At least, you 
might sav, this Parliament, if it fails to govern by the 
people for the people, makes an abundance of laws — that 
is, it succeeds as a Legislature. But with the making 
of an abundance ot laws in ' record time ' the success of 
the Diet ot the Japanese Constitution of 1SS9 ends. 
It is a complete demonstration of a somewhat novel 
truth, that the success of legislatures is not to be 
measured by the volume of their consummated 
labours. 

First, of course, there is the fact that the Japanese 
House of Representatives is not a representative house. 
It is retiu-ned by perhaps live per cent of the population 
of adult males, including qualitied voters who do not 
vote. Then members of this House of Representatives 
which does not represent, are as vet chieflv honest, 
avowed makers of a political living, IVIanv have 
scarcely yet arrived at the epoch of concealment — that 
era in the development of a free political system when 
it becomes necessary for the politicians to profess 
political probity for appearance sake. ' It is dis- 
interested men we need,' Marquis Ito confesses. So 
it is, and the wages of the Japanese legislator are the 
voice of a syren to the few who would be disinterested 
if they might. The member's salary of £200 a year 
has vast potentialities in a country where the masses 
bring up families on a pound or thirty shillings a 
month, where the Prime Minister receives £g6o a vear, 



CHAOS AND AN A B C POLICY 191 

and a bank account of yT 100 is affluence. The M.P., 
too, has his £200 for a three months' session. 

Besides a House of Representatives which does not 
represent there is the political simphcity, the picturesque, 
vari-coloured ignorances, the encrusted indifferences, the 
tenacious egoisms, local and general, the customary 
tyrannies, the consecrated prejudices ; in a word, the 
deep-seated Orientalisms, of the mass of the people 
who, if the Revolution has unsealed their eyes and 
given them a glimmer of the glorious vision, are not 
far enough removed from the deep darkness of the 
Feudal Night to perceive the real brightness and the 
super-excellent benefits of the light of the New Day. 
There is the mass of the people which the House of 
Representatives should, and may some time, represent, 
but which in the meantime does obeisance to its Mikado- 
god, and is not even indifferent to the franchise, some 
knowledge being a necessary premise even of the attitude 
of indifference. The leavening of this lump with the 
leaven, first of desire, then of hope, then of knowledge, 
is part of the future work — the enormous future work 
— of the Revolution. It is a failure of the Revolution 
that in this work it began ill with a Constitution which 
perhaps retards rather than assists the process of un- 
sealing the people's eyes. 

There is further the total failure of Japanese political 
parties, a failure which spells the indefinite postpone- 
ment of quasi -representative government. Popular 
government has not yet cast a shadow before in Japan ; 
its substance has scarcely yet risen above the distant 
horizon whence it might cast a shadow. 

Finally, there is the ruling Oligarchy, whose rule is at 
once a signal of the failure of constitutional politics in 
Japan and a guarantee of the progress of the work of 



192 JAPAN 

the Revolution, that work which, according to some 
professed expectations of the Oligarchy, is preparing the 
way or will prepare a way for the success of constitu- 
tional politics in Japan. The men of the Oligarchy are 
the trustees of the Revolution, men who either themselves 
assisted at its birth, or sat at the feet of its creators. 
They are repositories of the secret formulas of its 
regimen, heirs of the onerous duty and glittering fame 
of holding its banner high and untarnished amid the 
* seas of trouble ' which in these present days peculiarly 
threaten its achievement, even its existence. 

Happily for the Oligarchy, for the Revolution, for 
Japan, there is a wonderful clearness at the centre of 
the darkness of confusion, contradiction, ineptitude, 
which the failure of the constitutional experiment has 
brought down upon the domestic politics of the country. 
Happily Japan's home and foreign policy is, as it were, 
the A B C of politics. The children of the rural 
villages of the country might understand it, and the 
need of it. I have no doubt some of them do under- 
stand it. The Japanese peasant, though he could not 
vote intelligently, could or might expound the national 
policy to you with all the precision and less of the 
hesitation of the average Japanese politician, who, as 
he must seem to be wise, must postulate the need of 
wisdom. In Europe it is a question what is to be the 
course of the ship ; for what port are we making, for 
what port shall we steer .? In Japan the course is laid, 
as it were, by Destiny, and the children of the land 
perceive whither it leads. The question is solely one 
of steering or, if you like, of navigation. The Oligarchs 
are experienced, efficient, able navigators, precisely the 
men for the ship in fact, but their command is held 
without regular authority ; it is not stated in the 



CHAOS AND AN A B C POLICY 193 

Articles of the Constitution, it is usurpation of a sort, 
and in a manner the negation of order and system. 
Their rule is the one bulwark against political chaos 
in Japan, but their rule is itself chaos of a kind. 

The national policy is indubitable cosmos, or, 
if you please, the rule of three, the A B C of 
politics. Abroad it is the preservation of China's 
integrity, until China's integrity is no longer a 
practical policy. You hear of this policy under the 
name of the Manchurian Question, sometimes as the 
Russo-Japanese imbroglio. They are one question, one 
policy, which for Japan is as clear as the light of high 
noon, as evident as morning. At home the policy is, 
if you wish, what the Japanese Emperor calls it, ' The 
work consequent on the Restoration,' or what I call it, 
* The completion of the fabric of the Revolution,' or 
what Marquis Ito calls it, ' Education.' Says Marquis 
Ito, who quite excels the Japanese Emperor and me as 
an authority : ' One of the topics that most frequently 
occupy my mind is the destiny of our dear Fatherland, 
its people, and its civilisation. I scarcely need tell you * 
[Marquis Ito is talking to a Japanese journalist friend] 
' that the fundamental condition for the future prosperity 
and greatness of the Japanese People consists in making 
it our aim to identify ourselves, as far as possible, with 
the most forward of the living civilisations of the world. 
The crisis of this choice should never be lost sight of 
in our endeavours at reform and progress in every 
department of our national life. I am, of course, aware 
of the importance of maintaining historic continuity in 
our national progress, and of adapting our reforming 
efforts to the special conditions and requirements of 
the country. That goes without saying. While, 
therefore, we must guard against any unnatural and 

o 



194 JAPAN 

abrupt deviation from the past history of the country, 
our ultimate and constant aim should be in all essentials 
to bring our civilisation in line with that of the most 
advanced nations of the world. Stated in this general 
manner {qw of our countrymen will take exception to 
my view of the matter. But if you look into the 
reality of things you will easily find instances of short- 
sighted deviations from the right path in legislative, in 
political, in educational, and in social quarters. . . . Of 
all the spheres of our national life it is in that of educa- 
tion that we should take particular care not to stray 
from the right path, for any faulty step in this field is 
fraught with far-reaching consequences.' 

In Education, it seems, is the future of the Revolu- 
tion, which, to be complete and sufficient, must include 
constitutional politics, the life of an incorporate people, 
the breath of a justly ordered state. 



XXIII 
A POTENTIAL DEMOCRACY? 

Is there a Japanese Democracy ? 

' Modern Socialism would not develop in Korea or 
in Tibet as a banana tree will not in the North Pole. 
It would be an utter nonsense to talk on the subject of 
forming a Socialist party based on the Marxian principles 
of social economy among the Hawaiian aborigines, or 
Ainu race in the northern extremity of Japan ! But it 
would not be an out-of-place subject when we talk of 
establishing a Social Democratic State in a country where 
the industry is conducted in the most civilised manner, 
and its existing government a limited constitutional 
monarchy of rather an advanced type.' 

This is from the Labour Worlds now or lately ' Sole 
Organ of Labour and Socialism in Japan ' ; from the two 
of its pages which are printed in an English language. 
The Labour World also tells you, in the same English 
language, that ' Socialists in Japan have been oppressed, 
their writings, speeches are severely censured without 
least consideration. Their meetings are supervised as 
if they were of criminals.' 

Relatively speaking, the English language of the 
Labour World of Tokyo is good. It has its meaning. 
Much English is written and printed in Japan of which 
the drift is very obscure. The vision or the candour of 

195 



196 JAPAN 

the Labour World is more at fault than its English. 
The ' sole organ of Labour and Socialism in Japan ' 
should know its arch enemy better than to write of it 
as ' a limited constitutional monarchy of rather an 
advanced type.' But this ignorance — it is nigh impos- 
sible to take it for sophistry — is instructive, and one 
feels the need of a clue when following up the trail of 
Japanese Socialism. This ignorance bewrays it. It 
bewrays it more than its English speech. If I must 
give Japanese Socialism a place in this record, I must 
classify it, determine its species. To do this I have 
to identify it, to distinguish its markings. I make a 
fair beginning when I light upon ' a limited constitu- 
tional monarchy of rather an advanced type,' which, 
by token of the Labour Worlds ' sole organ,' etc., is 
Japanese Socialism's notion of its enemy. To achieve 
my final scientific result I record my first scientific 
observation : ' Japanese Socialism does not know its 
enemy ' ; logical inferences : ' Japanese Socialism does 
not know its mission ; does not know Japan ; does not 
know itself ; does not know what is Socialism ; it knows 
nothing ; it does not exist.' 

Whiff! My investigation is complete. I have 
classified Japanese Socialism. I have ' reduced ' it. 
Biologically I have placed the specimen in the museum, 
mounted and labelled it. It is as it were nothing, and 
I have so marked it. A clean, quick, skilful piece of 
work, redounding highly to my credit ! 

This is one way, to be sure, of disposing of Japanese 
Socialism, and I am not sure, in all honesty, that it is 
not, for the present, the just, that is to say, the scientific 
way. I feel that merely to announce Japanese Socialism 
is to affirm a phenomenon, as if the spread of Hegel- 
ianism in Morocco were to be stated, or of Hedonism 



A POTENTIAL DEMOCRACY? 197 

in Hell. To discuss it in detail were to build a super- 
structure of argument on a quibble, to draw out a 
philosophy from a half-truth. With all design of 
candour I yield up here my persuasion that, in the 
present Japanese ensemble — an extraordinary ensemble 
of Beauty and Chaos — Japanese Socialism is nothing. 
By way of qualification let me say that it is next to 
nothing, meaning that to-morrow, or the day after, it 
may be next to something. 

It is, nevertheless, certain that in the summer of 
1 90 1 the Home Department of the Japanese Govern- 
ment took certain action as to socialist organisations 
in Japan and their publications. The Department, let 
us put it, took action contemplating the control or 
contingent repression of nothing. Other Departments 
of the Japanese Government have been known to do a 
like thing. 

It is also certain that in April 1902 there was a 
' Labour Demonstration ' in Tokyo. I have before me 
a report of the speeches. I notice from the account 
that a newspaper of Tokyo, in order to promote its 
connection, had organised a ' social gathering ' of 
labourers. The report of the ' Demonstration ' states 
that it, the ' Demonstration,' was held to protest against 
the police prohibition of the aforementioned ' social 
gathering.' So it seems the ' Demonstration ' was a 
demonstration of nothing — at any rate of nothing 
relating to the vital import of our word Labour, with 
its capital L. We are again, in fact, come upon 
nothing. 

But the report of the ' Demonstration ' states that 
one speaker ' urged the necessity of waging successful 
war against the Government ' ; also that another ' char- 
acterised the Government as regarding the labourers as 



198 JAPAN 

if they were beasts,' and the officials ' as caring nothing 
but to buy the goodwill of capitalists, who spent their 
money and time on riotous living.' It is the language 
of Socialism, or, at the least, the language of Labourism. 
Here we come upon something — the language of 
Labourism from one man, possibly from two. They 
are like the Labour World; they do not know their 
enemy. But, like the Labour Worlds they say some- 
thing. Hence, when affirming that in the Japanese 
ensemble Japanese Socialism is not, I guard myself with 
the qualification that to-morrow or the day following it 
may be. 

I go on to mention that there is, or was yesterday, 
a Socialist Association in Tokyo, and I fear that by this 
mention I tell an untruth. I mean that even the 
Socialist Association is nothing, or next to nothing. 
Still, I mention that it exists, or existed when I was last 
in Tokyo, and I thereby assume the responsibility of a 
possible untruth, since of some things it may be said 
that though they exist they do not live. 

There is even a philosophic Socialism in Japan. 
Here is a Japanese philosophic Socialist's formulated 
scheme : — ' ( i ) The institution of a compulsory life 
insurance system for the workers ; (2) special fees for 
medical advice to workers ; (3) the establishment of 
a bureau for the proper distribution of labour ; (4) 
prevention of the diminution of the agricultural class 
by improvements of the land tenure system.' This has 
a serious, therefore formidable, appearance, but again I 
assure you it is necessary to believe that it is nothing, or 
next to nothing. 

My case, my scientific result, is sufficiently stated 
and finally proved in a judicious Tokyo newspaper of 
April 8, 1903, which says of Japanese Socialism : — 



A POTENTIAL DEMOCRACY? 199 

* With [some] apparent practical vitality we may safely 
state that Socialism is in this country still in the stage 
of academic discussion, and that the day when it will 
assume practical significance is as yet, if such a day is 
ever to come, in the far distant future.' 

I replace the specimen in the museum, having 
verified the label. Nevertheless, I go away remembering 
that the Labour World and two men of Tokyo have 
used the speech of Socialism. 

Now, in this that I have written, I have viewed 
Japanese Socialism subjectively, or nearly so. Objectively 
I find it impossible to view it. If subjectively it is next 
to nothing, objectively it is less than nothing. More, 
it is, I think, a jest. I think of a comfortable, sonsy, 
Scotch farmer's wife proposing to wear the hairy shirt 
of penance for imagined sins, and I merely laugh. So 
I laugh when I think of Socialism in Japan, objectively. 
In this lovely, smiling land, whose people eat Beauty, 
where men are turned from unbeautiful vices by 
sudden visions of the autumn moon — ' converted ' by 
the mute eloquence of the beauty of the world } ^ In 
this land where every dale and grove has its nymph 
or goblin, where every fox is a devil, and every street 
has its astrologer } It is not possible. Objectively, 
Japanese Socialism is first a jest ; secondly, it is 
impossible. 

Perhaps the sober way to look at it, to deal with it, 
is by association. Associate it with the Revolution and 
you account for it, for the nothing there is of it. 
Better still, associate it with the Japanese plutocracy and 
you more than account for it. You then reduce it to 

^ In an issue of September 1900 of the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun {Shtnano Daily 
News) there is this advertisement : ' The absence of the moon on the mid-autumnal 
night impressed me strongly, and I hereby pledge myself to drink no more.' It is 
grotesque, but is it not somewhat like the restraints of sacred memories among us ? 



200 JAPAN 

what It is — to nothing. Take the Japanese plutocracy 
and the Japanese ochlocracy — take them together, 
bring them together, and like warring essences in the 
crucible, they annihilate each other. 

For there is no Japanese plutocracy, and there being 
none, Japanese Socialism is deprived of its cause — that 
is to say, it does not exist ; or existing, exists only as an 
imported germ of philosophic Socialism whose father is 
an Idea — an imported Idea. 

In Japan there are men who have made mo!iey, but 
none who want the world to know it. Not long since 
a Toyko newspaper made a census of the rich men of 
the land. In a population of 45,000,000 there are, it 
seems, some thirty men who may be worth ^200,000 ; 
there are some 450 who possess not less than _^ 5 0,000. 
There are, then, rich men — an indistinguishable 
peppering of them among 45,000,000 who are rich in 
contentment — but there is not a phitocracy. The rich 
man in Japan is, strangely enough, as content as the 
poor man ; he does not, that is to say, use his riches to 
nourish and inflame an immeasurable discontent. He 
goes along in his quiet, unostentatious way, just as if he 
were poor. ' Which of us,' asks the English editor of 
an English newspaper in Japan, who has been thirty years 
there, — ' which of us knows of even one very wealthy 
Japanese who makes a parade of his riches or devotes 
his money to purposes of glitter and display ? ' The 
question is a fine testimony to the wealthy men of 
Japan. The why of it is not a mystery. It is part of 
the social canon of Old Japan which named ostentation 
a sin. Here the old social canon has resisted the 
Revolution. The Revolution has not crowned Itself 
with the crown of a swaggering plutocracy. Japan, 
retaining too much of her good manners, imposes a 



A POTENTIAL DEMOCRACY? 201 

hardship on her rich men ; they cannot appear rich even 
if they would. 

What then follows ? There is not yet a Japanese 
plutocracy. How then can there be an ochlocracy ? 
Sociology has its laws of compensation even in Japan, 
amid the Japanese Revolution. Apart from questions 
of intelligence, of education in advanced European 
theories of social equity, apart also from questions of 
an inherited predisposition of contentment, the fabric 
of society, even in Japan, must conform to the postulates 
of architectural science. The fabric of Japanese society, 
having put out no plutocratic wing on the one side, 
should exhibit no ochlocratic extension on the other. 
And so it is. 

There is, a^ain, the Japanese aristocracy. There 
is a Japanese aristocracy, and there is not. If there be 
no plutocracy and no ochlocracy, in a different sense 
there is no Japanese aristocracy. In the first place, the 
Japanese aristocracy died thirty years ago by its own 
hand, for which it should be for ever remembered by 
Japan and the world. There is no greater act in history, 
I firmly believe, than the self-immolation of the Japanese 
aristocracy thirty odd years ago. It was necessary, but 
it was no less noble. It was complete. They were 
princes, rulers over their own people, in their own 
capitals. They gave themselves to be pensioners, they 
consented to imprisonment — to be private gentlemen in 
the suburbs of Tokyo who had administered the power 
of life and death in moated castles set in the midst of 
fair provinces. Out of their death sprang the new life of 
Japan. Their immolation was more than noble ; it was 
useful in an absolute sense. 

A remnant of this Aristocracy, which gave up its 
life for that of a nation, remains. Its castles survive 



202 JAPAN 

throughout the country, phantoms of a recent yet 
remote Feudal Age. The moats are still deep and 
full, and the cyclopean walls, which their waters lave, 
are unbroken. Even the stucco of the high corner 
towers, with their double tilted -eave roofs, walls 
through which it seems you might have thrust a fist 
when they were new — their stucco yet gleams starch- 
white afar in sunny country prospects. Abandoned but 
yesterday, when their lords and ladies left for the 
Tokyo suburbs, so that their mere presence in their 
old haunts of power should not distract the peasant's 
eye from the new vision of national life — abandoned 
but yesterday, the castles of the Japanese aristocracy 
were yet, as it seems, given up to ruin ages ago. An 
epoch, a cycle, has passed since armed men leaned on 
their parapets. Yet it is a cycle of but thirty years. 

It is somewhat so with the Japanese aristocracy. 
They are dead, but, as you might say, they were living 
yesterday. On great occasions what survives of them 
— the remnant — is seen or heard fluttering about the 
steps of the throne. Some puissant barons of old, 
their identity hidden beneath bright new titles of 
nobility, conferred by the Revolution, discuss matters 
for legislation in the Upper House of the Japanese 
Parliament. One reads in Japanese newspapers that, 
as if in unmanly remorse of their great sacrifice, they 
now spend their last vitalities in frightful vices. Let us 
prefer to remember the grandeur of the sacrifice they 
made upon the altar of patriotism. 

There remains in opposition to a potential Japanese 
Democracy what I must horribly call a Mediocracy. 
They are the captains, secretaries, administrators, re- 
tainers of the dead Aristocracy when it was a living 
Princedom. They are these or their sons. The 



A POTENTIAL DEMOCRACY? 203 

servants, the right-hand men, the centurions of the 
old Aristocracy before its self-immolation, they are 
now by way of becoming a new Aristocracy. It is 
they who govern. They are the ruling Oligarchy. 
Of them are Ito, Okuma, Yamagata, Matsukata, the 
present Prime Minister, and most of the others, 
Japanese statesmen or soldiers, of whom the world 
hears or has heard. They are also Japanese officialdom. 

This Mediocracy holds its head high. It cuts 
plutocracy — potential plutocracy — dead, and often 
looks for ochlocracy through a microscope. If pride 
and high disdain be anywhere or at any time just, this 
mediocracy is perhaps justified, for it is they who have 
raised the fabric of the Japan of the Revolution on the 
ground which the old Aristocracy prepared with its 
bones. They are able men ; they, chiefly, are the 
brain of Japan, and therefore perhaps its future. 
Above all, they are patriots, though proud. 

Yet it is almost to be regretted that this Mediocracy 
should be so completely necessary. Were the case 
otherwise, there might have been a Japanese Democracy 
— at the least a Japanese Democracy in the making. 
I mean that as Japan is already a Nationality ; that, as 
a doctrine of Nationality, not indeed strictly of a kind 
with that which bore United Italy and Confederated 
Germany, is already admitted, expressed, embodied, in 
the Japanese nation, the nation is already a potential 
Democracy, though adoring an Emperor, permitting a 
Mediocracy, and ruled by an Oligarchy. Here, it may 
be, my possible touches the borders of the fantastic. 
Yet Japan, as it stands to the rest of the world, is 
more than a Nationality. It is a Family, with many of 
the instincts, much of the exclusiveness, something of 
the fundamentally democratic sense and order of the 



204 JAPAN 

Family. Its very patriotism, beholding a god-emperor, 
divine father of the land ; its very worship of ancestors ; 
are family traits, established, operating in the national 
circle. 

There may not here be a potential Democracy, but 
if not there may be a new political order for which we 
have no name ; an order in which there is no pluto- 
cracy and no ochlocracy, in which aristocracy has died 
by its own hand, in which only a mediocracy, necessary 
from the circumstances of the moment, stands clearly 
apart or above the general order. Shall we, in Japan, 
once, and but thirty years ago, caste-ridden as if by 
law of nature, see, for the first time in history, a nation 
without classes.'' 



XXIV 

EDUCATION WITHOUT A CANON 

The Japanese schoolboy is a very engaging little 
fellow. Almost always he is learning English, so, as 
you pass him in the streets of Tokyo, the capital, or 
even in the streets of a one-horse provincial town, he 
will very probably shout a * Goo-dc ' to you, which, 
upon reflection, you perceive to be the standard 
greeting of your own country. The Japanese school- 
boy is by no means backward at a venture with his 
l^^nglish. He likes to see the foreigner's smile of 
recognition, and all foreigners are English to him. 
Upon invitation he will with great eagerness enter into 
a conversation with you upon the basis of his vocabu- 
lary of a score of words and six exclamatory idioms. 
The conversation is, doubtless, rather fragmentary, but 
his smile, his ' aliveness,' and his fine teeth are your 
entertainment. His is to exhaust upon you his vocabu- 
lary of words and idioms, and this he does without 
relevance to the topic you have introduced. Never- 
theless, seeing him, you may well reflect that the 
Educational Canon in Japan has an excellent ' subject,' 
if it have nothing else. This stufl^ should turn to gold 
in the hands of the administrators of the Canon. It is, 
in fact, already gold. 

The Japanese schoolboy is an eager fellow, of a 

205 



2c6 JAPAN 

lively temj-ker ; his ' mentality,' as you may observe on 
the streets of Tokyo, is quick and responsive. One 
makes further inquiry among the authorities, and the 
impressions of the street are fully confirmed. Says one 
(I here quote tlie written testimony of a cultured 
Eui^lishman, an erstwhile teacher of the youth of the 
country) : * He is eager, e:irnest, zealous, hungry for 
knowledge, full of patriotic purpose.' ' He is the 
schoolmaster's delight,' says Professor Chamberlain, the 
first authority, ' quiet, intelligent, deferential, studious 
almost to excess/ — this more jxirticularly of the student, 
who mayhap has lost the Japanese schoolboy's delight- 
ful gait of irresponsibility. ' Yet withal,' Mr, Chimiber- 
lain tells you, ' he is a rebel.' And one finds it so. 
There is a passion ot revolt in the breast of the 
Japanese schoolboy. Barrii^gs-out are his business, it 
seems, learning his recreation. He would be his own 
teacher, his own professor ; possibly his own Minister 
of Education. It is perhaps only a passing symptom ; 
it is certain that in these days one may not usually 
scan a Japanese newspaper without encountering some 
chronicle ot a schoolboy ' strike.' Its rat son may be 
anything. It may be some sudden psychological 
umbrage at a member of the teaching staff; or a 
griey;ince relating to the new ' Reader ' ; or the class, 
ha\'ing made progress in the English alphabet, desires 
instant introduction to the works of Lord Macaulay, a 
course to which the teacher of English has his public 
and private objections. It would be ut\fair to put too 
serious an interpretation on the boy's contempt of 
authority ; perhaps it is but the defect of his excellent 
zeal and prompt enthusiasm. It is established that he 
is first of all eager. His eagerness, one finds, is of the 
quality of tlie educational * atmosphere ' of the country ; 



EDUCATION WITHOUT A CANON 207 

it is part of it ; possibly the source of it ; at any rate it 
is of the same origin. Become intimate with the 
Japanese schoolboy's quality of eagerness, and you 
have in a measure found the Japanese educational Idea, 
the country's educational sou). Qualify the quality 
with mention of its nearest kin and you get as complete 
a characterisation of the Educational Canon in Japan 
as is perhaps possible : eagerness ; dissatisfaction with 
things as they are ; desire of new things ; the capacity 
for experiment ; volatility ; inconstancy. This, nearly, 
is the Educational Canon of -the country. The 
Japanese, it is certain, apply — unconsciously perhaps — 
this great truth about the canon in education, — the 
truth that first of all there is no canon. 

It would not be very wonderful, when you think of 
it, to find a fine frenzy of education in Japan. One 
may scarcely, indeed, say that it quite amounts to this. 
There is an enthusiasm of education, but it is not a 
steady flame. It will burn fiercely to-day, so that all 
the eloquent tongues of the land wag with eager colloquy 
on the uses, aims, defects, qualities ; the past, the present, 
the future, of the national education. To-morrow the 
debate will turn on the economic situation, or the re- 
vival of the classical drama. There is an enthusiasm of 
education, but it has to take its turn with others. It is 
well — perhaps well enough — that it should have its turn 
with others, yet it would not be surprising if education 
should be the grand passion in Japan. The Revolution, 
the metamorphosis of the last half century, has been no 
other than a sort of miraculously rapid process of edu- 
cation. The nation has been herded into the school of 
European ideas, manners, customs, methods ; European 
thought, European reason, European ideals. It has 
been required to learn in fifty years or less what all 



2o8 JAPAN 

Europe has spent a thousand years and much bloody 
agony in acquiring. U this tremendous ordeal has been 
kindly accepted, what more iiatural than to expect the 
nation to have passed into a sort of" educational ecstasy ? 
The ordeal might have been terrible enough to induce 
a less admirable madness in a people ot another mind 
than the Japanese. But their sanity has undoubtedly 
survived, and they might therefore most reason- 
ably be expected to emerge a nation of educational 
zealots — a nation ot priests ot the noblest of himian 
cults. 

In a manner it is so, but with many qualifications. 
One qualification — one of the important qualifications 
— is that the nation has as yet by no meatus mastered 
the text-book of European civilisation to which its 
leaders introduced it forty or fifty years ago. Mastering 
this text-book in forty years, the Japanese might by 
now haN'e become a nation of slaves of the passion of 
education — the passion of learning ; they might have 
presented to the world the unique spectacle of a nation 
of one mind in living but to learn. This achievement 
— who knows ? — might have given us a people devoured 
by a master aim, an aim of knowing, of learning, of 
inquiry, of culture, of light, of illumination. But, save 
by a group of acuter minds, the text-book of F.uropean 
civilisation is not yet mastered in Japan. Hence there 
is only a group who may be said to be ' possessed ' by 
the educational Idea as by a grand aim. With them it 
is a habit, an enthusiasm, a gospel, very nearly a religion. 
Being the leaders, as by natural right, or in the ranks 
immediately behind the leaders, this group counts for 
much, for everything, so that sometimes they make it 
to appear that Japan's policy, Japan itself, as it were, is 
expressed or summed up in a single word — Education. 



EDUCATION WITHOUT A CANON 209 



The periodical literature of the country periodically 
teems with their discussions of the country's educational 
problems, or discussions inspired by them, or by their 
acts. The educational specialist from Europe arriving 
in Tokyo at particular junctures finds that he can there 
breathe an atmosphere of academic and practical educa- 
tional 'agitation ' as native, as refreshing to his nostrils, 
as any he may find in London or even Oxford or 
Heidelberg. At such seasons Japan appears to be one 
political party, one ethical group — a party which has 
adopted Education as the whole of politics, a group 
which has agreed that Education is the whole of Ethics. 
In these days, too, there is an extraordinary crop of 
Educational Societies all over the land, each possibly 
with a special, exclusive programme and policy of its 
own. The appearance is somewhat deceptive, however. 
There may be — it is probably safe to aver that there 
is — in Japan an educational cult composed of some 
enlightened spirits who give to the educational Idea a 
constant and unswerving devotion ; men who have grad- 
uated with or without distinction at Oxford, Cambridge, 
Yale, Harvard, Heidelberg, Paris, and who, in addition, 
are intense patriots, and have convinced themselves 
that the gospel of education in the Japan of to-day is 
the highest patriotism. These, however, are not the 
Japanese people, of whom all that may perhaps be said 
is that the upheaval of the past half-century, in its effect 
upon their temperament from the standpoint of educa- 
tion, has communicated an unrest of ideas, manifested 
in much curiosity and great eagerness about the ' new 
things' from abroad. This curiosity, this eagerness, 
makes the Japanese schoolboy stuff of gold, but as the 
schoolboy grows, Orientalism crowds his daily life, and 
convenience and the law of self-preservation require 

p 



2IO JAPAN 

many surrenders to it. Moreover, the cult of leaders 
is lamentably short of funds. 

Nevertheless, Japan is so much in the hands, or at 
the feet, of its leaders that a generalisation is almost 
permissible in this matter, such as this, namely, that the 
national attitude towards education is excellent in respect 
of its exhibiting the supreme virtue of dissatisfaction 
with past achievement and present attainment. This 
is, of course, in the very spirit of education — the spirit 
itself. It means, let it be repeated, that the nation has 
learned the one great truth about the educational canon 
— the truth that there is none. It means that the 
Revolution is safe ; that it is still at work ; that re- 
action, or even a stoppage, is impossible. The writings 
and speeches of leaders on educational questions, if 
these should be taken as disclosing the mind of the 
country, assure us that Japan is at least on the right 
road. For the most plausible interpretation of these is 
that there never was a people less satisfied with them- 
selves and their accomplishments than the Japanese. 
Says Baron Sone, Minister of Finance, or Chancellor of 
the Exchequer, in a review article : ' Artificiality is the 
characteristic of our education to-day. It all looks very 
well on paper, but there is a lack of thoroughness and 
reality about it. . . . Our learning, after all, is mostly 
ornamental. . . . Our students' heads may be full of 
lofty ideas, but unfortunately the fate of nations is not 
dependent on a supply of philosophers.' Baron Kikuchi, 
ex-Minister of Education, graduate of Cambridge, and 
ex-President of the Imperial University of Tokyo, in a 
speech as Minister of Education, says : ' We are beset 
by the evil of excessive cramming. ... In most of 
our elementary schools the books are galloped through, 
pupils being required to write down as much as possible 



EDUCATION WITHOUT A CANON 211 

of what falls from the teachers' lips. . . . Our general 
methods of teaching have this great drawback that they 
fail to establish a connection between the mind of the 
teacher and the minds of the students,' Mr. Ozaki 
Yukio, a radical patriot, is convinced that ' educationally 
we are on the wrong track.' He assigns causes for the 
evils of his finding: '(i) The influence of Chinese 
learning ; (2) the habits begotten by Feudalism which 
still remain ; (3) the worship of officialdom and con- 
tempt for the callings of ordinary citizens ; (4) lack of 
ambition and enterprise, and general narrowness of 
view.' Mr. Ozaki charges his country's educational 
regime with a cardinal sin : he says it is unpractical. 

It is just, however, to state the position in another 
way. Is it not well, is it not at any rate fairly well, 
with a people who judge themselves so hardly as these.? 
May it not be said of them that educationally they are 
safe because they are dissatisfied } Not that the mass 
of the people are permeated by this saving discontent, 
but it seems their chiefs are, and the chiefs in this matter 
are the people and their future. Fundamentally it is 
well with the canon, so called ; for the capacity of self- 
examination, which the chiefs exhibit, guarantees revision, 
reform, progress. Hence the indictments of Japanese 
education — the educational regime — which might be 
drawn in abundance by mere reproduction of the 
speeches and writings of Japanese notables, argue the 
best about it. They are a healthy symptom. If they 
were true they might be the only healthy symptom, for 
their various damnation might be quoted against the 
regime in its totality, root and branch. The indict- 
ments, however, do not agree ; one will charge that the 
regime is over-practical, another aver that it is under- 
practical. We may infer that it has its good points in 



212 JAPAN 

addition to its excellent and saving capacity of self- 
examination. 

Doubtless, in the absence or negation of an educa- 
tional canon, there is an inherent liability to inconstancy, 
diffusion of energies, indirection. Denial of a canon 
excuses the vogue of all theories and authorises the 
promulg:.l; on of every kind of view ; it menaces ideals 
and reverses policies ; were demagogy powerful in Japan 
it might commit the sacred ark to the care of a charlatan 
or a mountebank. Here, however, the oligarchical rule 
of the country guards from loss — from grave loss at any 
rate ; the oligarchy alone is powerful, and it strikes the 
keynote upon which the educational cultus must write 
its themes. This keynote is emancipation from all the 
baser bondage of Orientalism. This is the one positive 
canon in the philosophy of Japanese educationists. This 
is the one exception, the one limit, to experiment. It 
is the high justification of all experiment. It is at the 
same time the most serious disability of the educationists, 
for there is sometimes sharp conflict of opinion as to 
what things are of the baser bondage of Orientalism. 

So it follows that the very canon — or lack of canon 
— which is the great propitious sign in Japanese educa- 
tion has the inner significance of a critical predicament, 
an awkward dilemma, for the educationists. ' We want 
and mean to have the best within our power,' is the 
language of the cultus, inspired by the oligarchy, but 
' What is the best ? ' is their question. It is better and 
it is worse to have a canon. It might, be better for 
Japan could her educationists irrevocably decide what 
things are the baser bondage of Orientalism, and what 
things of the same Orientalism are worthy. In this 
decision there is the future of Japan — the future of her 
modern era, the stability of her Revolution. Japanese 



EDUCATION WITHOUT A CANON 213 

education — the regime^ the policy — is beset by a con- 
tinuing problem of what Orientalism is good and worthy 
of preservation, and what is bad and unworthy. There 
is a sort of complementary problem, — what of Euro- 
peanism is proven good and worthy of adoption, and 
what proven ill and therefore already condemned. 
These are not historical problems in Japan ; they are 
problems which arise now, and must perplex Japanese 
educationists of the future, and Japanese statesmen of 
the future. The past was, in this aspect, obvious and 
axiomatic. Up to a certain point it could be, it must 
be, Europeanism — this only. The past was easy ; it 
held no problem. Orientalism, as the ruling code, at 
any rate as all the code, spirit and substance, became 
impossible. Nowadays, however, the question arises : 
May Europeanism be all the code, spirit and sub- 
stance — can it be with Japanese origins in Orientalism, 
and the good of some part of Europeanism still doubt- 
ful } It is a problem of the Statesmanship as well as of 
the Education of the country. 

For instance, of recent years the problem has taken 
peremptory shape in one great question for decision — 
Shall we abandon Chinese ideographic writing } The 
party which regards ideographic writing as a baser 
Orientalism says in effect that its maintenance means 
that the Japanese child spends and will spend five or six 
years in learning its alphabet — the ABC wherewith it 
reads and writes. There is, however, a party which sees 
in Chinese character-writing an Orientalism of great 
educational virtue. It is, they say, a fine discipline of 
the mind and a fundamental culture comparable in 
worth to the Greek and Latin languages in the European 
scheme of a liberal education. This is the problem, 
the educational dilemma, in concrete shape. It takes 



214 JAPAN 

other forms — it arises in other most practical and per- 
tinent questions, which essentially are questions for a 
decision between Europeanism and Orientalism. Some- 
times advanced theorists raise the question in this large 
form : * Ought we not to teach the whole art and practice 
of Europeanism in our schools ? ' One able parliament- 
arian and budding statesman writes in this wise for 
instance : ' In Japan children are regarded as existing 
for the sake of their parents, as their special property, 
as at their disposal to a very large extent. Every effort 
is made to keep up the dependence of the child on its 
parent for as long a time as possible. In England the 
great object of parents is to make their children, especi- 
ally their boys, independent as soon as possible. . . . 
But the Japanese parent is full of the past and never 
wearies of relating to his children what the good old 
ancestors thought and said, and how the sons and 
daughters of days gone by revered their fathers and 
mothers and remained subject to them all their days. . . . 
The Anglo-Saxon boy goes out into the world with 
self-confidence and courage and does battle with his 
competitors. Compared with the go-ahead Anglo- 
Saxon youth, our young men scarcely appear young ; 
their lethargy savours of old age.' Here the question, 
simply put, is this : ' Does not much of the baser part 
of Orientalism still drag our educational wheels ? ' 

So it is clear that if the educational Idea in Japan 
be unfettered by a canon, it is, on the other hand, apt 
to be perplexed by a problem — the problem, namely, 
to what extent it is desirable and beneficial to neglect 
or reject all canons. There is a quasi -canon which 
decrees the rejection of all hurtful Orientalism — and, 
conversely, the retention of what of good there may be 
of it — and the adoption of all beneficial Europeanism. 



EDUCATION WITHOUT A CANON 215 

This pseudo-canon has been of easy interpretation, and 
has been inspired with marvellous rapidity in the past ; 
but in these times it presents critical occasions for a 
fine faculty of selection. The cult whose highest 
patriotism is a policy of education has a magnificent, 
nay, a unique opportunity. It seems they need also 
unique gifts. 

I have said the cult is lamentably short of funds. 
So it is. There are between 26,000 and 27,000 
elementary schools with an average pupil -roll of 
between 150 and 160. The annual expenditure per 
school is but £,^S- There are 64,000 teachers — 
95,000 or 96,000 is the needed strength — who, over 
all, are paid less than £1^ per annum. The Japanese 
pedagogue is required to make great sacrifices for his 
country's naval and military prestige, and he does it, 
obscurely, yet often with a shining virtue. 



XXV 

THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL 

It was Exhibition Day at the brand-new Women's 
University, raised in the midst of an umbrageous 
pleasaunce on the western skirts of Tokyo — a day of 
sun, of light, of colour, of breezy, exhilarating brilliance, 
in the autumn of 1902. Days of rain had made bogs 
of roads, but we walked by proxy, paying jinrikisha- 
pullers to be our vicarious sacrifice to the gods of pure 
mud. 

Our tickets mentioned early forenoon for the open- 
ing, which was quite Japanese. In Japan they make a 
day of it, not an afternoon or an evening. You rise 
early to go to your Japanese garden-party. Your 
picnic or 'social meeting' may begin at 9.30 or 10 
A.M., and you are back home in mid-afternoon. Even 
in winter your card of invitation to the various feast 
which resident foreigners irreverently designate a 
* geisha spree' — essentially an evening entertainment 
— mentions 5 or 5.30 p.m. as the hour of assembly ; 
though, in truth, if you obey the letter. of the invita- 
tion, you must receive and entertain yourself for an 
hour or two before the arrival of your host or hosts 
at the appointed temple of Bacchus at the unappointed 
hour. 

It was indeed even so at the brand-new Women's 

216 



THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL 217 

University. Doubtless punctuality as a womanly virtue 
is preached ; but apparently we expected too much 
when we looked for it to be practised on Exhibition 
Day. We calculated to arrive upon an item well 
down the long ' Programme of Exercises,* — in fact, we 
spent quite a while discovering a lively but somewhat 
irrelevant admiration of the environs of the Women's 
University. The Women's University we did not 
admire. That was not possible. One does not 
admire a wooden barn, even if double-storied and 
variegated with rows of windows, five feet by three. But 
one admires the facade of a row of grown Japanese 
cedars ; and the scent of a pine-grove is half-romantic, 
because it was one of the enjoyments of our far-off 
romantic forebears, whose instincts are our romances. 

No, you would not say that the Women's University 
in Tokyo — which is not called the Japanese Women's 
College of Liberty, or Hall of Emancipation, but may 
prove to be either or both, — you would not say that 
it is architecturally handsome, or even architecturally 
substantial ; you would only say that it is finely 
situated amid the beauty of trees and green swards 
which belongs to both sexes, even in Japan, 

There were great cedars and pines and green lawns, 
but, especially for this day, there was a high fence of 
shingles enclosing a piece of the grounds, half the size 
of a football pitch. And there were Venetian poles 
and streamers along the fence, and draperies about 
the gate, all to impress upon us that it was a * gala 
occasion,' for which the majesty of noble trees is never 
majestic enough even in Japan, and the green of the 
grass and the sapphire of the sky not anything like a 
sufficient colour scheme. 

We entered the enclosure in the press of a very 



21 8 JAPAN 

great throng. Everywhere, except in the sky and in 
the trees, was the modern Japanese High School girl. 
You see her frequently in the streets of Tokyo, and, 
almost as modern, in the streets of those provincial 
cities where she has a High School. But she is never 
obtrusively prominent upon the streets. Here, how- 
ever, she was everywhere — in a state of high excite- 
ment, it seemed, from the way she darted hither and 
thither with messages from and to the stewards of 
the day. She eyed us half- shyly, I thought almost 
coquettishly ; us foreigners, big, brazen, red-haired, 
yet, by all accounts, wonderfully considerate to our 
women-folk — mines of the new learning to which she, 
the High School girl, was being introduced, and withal, 
no doubt very rich. She seemed to smile at thought 
of our coming to see her feats in our sisters' accom- 
plishments. 

She was everywhere, I say. She filled tiers of seats 
round two sides of the enclosure ; she was going and 
coming in swarms, in and out at the gate, about and 
around us. She wore no hat — she never does. She 
was not in Japanese dress, save occasionally ; nor yet 
in European, save very occasionally. She wore, as she 
nearly always does now — even from the time when she 
is only an elementary school girl, — a maroon skirt, 
coming to a little below the knee, and a blouse-bodice 
of white or mauve or dove-grey, or any not too garish 
tint ; also laced boots and black stockings. As to her 
bodice-blouse and her skirt, she is halfr Japanese, half- 
European. As to her laced boots and black stockings, 
she is entirely European, for no compromise betwixt 
the European boot or shoe and the Japanese clog has 
yet been found for her. On the whole she is, as to her 
dress, a cross, a hybrid ; not ungraceful, nor at all the 



THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL 219 

last word on female attire. As to her face, figure, 
deportment, manner, what are they, what do they 
express? Something extraordinary ! She is tall and 
big for her age ; her cheeks are full and plump, 
and the hybrid skirt permits a glance at fine rounded 
calves. She is, I am persuaded, as tall as our High 
School girl, but plumper. This alone is remarkable, 
extraordinary ; for the full-grown Japanese race, especi- 
ally its women-folk, is smaller by half a head than we 
are. Then her complexion, oftener than not, is clear 
almost to white ; pigmented, as often as not, with 
a delicate, finely-graded peach-bloom. This too is 
remarkable, extraordinary ; for the grown Japanese 
man is yellow or copper brown ; the Japanese woman 
yellow like parchment, or yellow like glazier's putty. 
But she is more besides tall and plump and clear- 
complexioned. I am persuaded — from more observa- 
tion than there was opportunity for on Exhibition 
Day at the Women's University, Tokyo — I am 
persuaded there is coquetry in her eye. There is, 
at any rate, incriminating evidence. You look, and 
the lids drop like the shutter of a camera. You 
look away and look again, and again they drop 
like the shutter of a camera. Eyes don't do this for 
nothing. I am persuaded it is coquetry, warring, per- 
haps, with an overpowering canon of pudency, partly 
taught in the High Schools, partly original, that is, 
inherent. Even so, it is remarkable, extraordinary, for 
the grown Japanese woman — the Japanese wife, especi- 
ally — is not only pudency, she is effacement — self- 
extinction. I think I have shown her to you as wife in 
her husband's house. And this coquettish eye is her 
daughter's, meaning her own, for to-morrow the High 
School girl will be wife. But more ; this High School 



220 JAPAN 

girl is lithe, active ; you would say, seeing her on the 
streets of Tokyo, almost athletic ; athletic without 
qualification, you would say, on Exhibition Day at the 
Women's University, Tokyo. She talks with anima- 
tion, almost she chatters ; and in these University 
grounds she runs and bobs and darts. It is remark- 
able, extraordinary ; for the Japanese wife is a study 
in passivity, almost a study in still life ; she speaks 
when spoken to, not else. Clearly there is a mystery 
somewhere. This Japanese High School girl, tall, 
plump, romping, glib, coquettish, eupeptic — behold 
her and, remembering the Japanese wife, agree with 
me that she is something extraordinary — she or the 
wife. 

The type-written * Programme of Exercises ' put in 
our hands ran to thirty-two items. I am not to take 
you through the programme. I have already given 
the best digest of it I can manage in introducing 
you to the High School girl, by courtesy, University 
Student, who was its * executant.' I find on reference 
to it that we saw such things as * Hoop Drill,' * Wooden 
Ring Play,' ' Poem-composing,' ' Cookery Race,' 
* Kasumi-no-Fuji,' ' Umbrellar Drill,' ' Bicylcle Race 
with Ball,' ' Vegitable Dell,' and a great many more 
which the typewriter spelt correctly, notwithstanding 
the last three of those I have quoted. It was all done 
to /Yankee Doodle,' 'Washington Post,' and others 
such, on a piano from which all the music had been 
beaten long, long ago — all save the correct time, which 
the Japanese drill-instructor, in a shiny morning coat, 
took from it, in spite of its neck. And it was all 
done, it seemed to me, with perfect success, except, 
perhaps, at the * lawn-tennis ' item, when one plump 
little girl, intending a strong spoon-stroke, threw her 



THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL 221 

racket high in the air and ran after it with a blushing, 
shameful laugh on her face. I think also that ' Bicycle 
Polo ' was a bit of a fizzle. On the other hand, I 
have a bright memory of a charming Maypole dance, 
and I recollect a * Fan Dance ' with stately onerous 
curtseys, like those of our very great-grandfathers and 
grandmothers in the minuet. 

But I confess my eyes chiefly saw the High School 
girl, tall to eupeptic as before, and not so much her feats 
of the day, remarkable as these were. We saw her 
class-rooms and her living-room-dormitory when she 
is a boarder — a superbly clean, mat-covered little place, 
opening backwards on a corridor, frontwards on the 
sun, with two little cabinet dressing-tables — strangely, 
almost plaintively, foreign in their Japanese setting — 
and nick-nacks and school books for two, there being 
two boarders to a room. 

It was a great day, the sun shining in a breezy, 
radiant, turquoise sky to the tail of afternoon, and I 
never wish to add a brighter picture to the gallery of 
memory than that which I and my friend took away 
with us when the great hedge-like row of cryptomeria 
came between us and the Women's University, 
Tokyo, as our jinrikisha- pullers escaped from the 
crowd. 

Nevertheless, the picture sets me a problem. It 
presents me a mystery — one more. There is a link 
missing, an hiatus, a void, a large point of interrogation. 
Take it as a point of interrogation and its place is in 
the space between the Japanese High School girl and 
the Japanese wife, the wife who, when you visit her 
husband, is kin to the monochrome crane on the sliding 
wall, who, in public places, walks eight or ten paces 
behind her wedded husband, the wife whose consistent, 



222 JAPAN 

consuming purpose in life is self-efFacement. Is there 
not a problem ? 

There is and there is not, for the problem is in 
reality a collision — a collision of two Codes, two Canons, 
two Civilisations. Japan is filled with the noise and 
sometimes with the disaster of this collision. It is the 
collision which I have already named a hundred times 
— the collision of the Old Order and the New. In the 
case of the Japanese High School girl and the Japanese 
wife it is a collision in which the High School girl is 
annihilated, a collision in which the Old Order ex- 
tinguishes the New. In other words, the Revolution, 
though it leagues with a charming conspirator, the 
High School girl, succumbs before the old Japanese 
canon of wifely conduct and manners — the canon whose 
crowning dogma is self-effacement. 

' A model wife,' says one of the foremost of Japan's 
novelists of the day, * must be the daughter of parents 
entertaining an affectionate regard towards each other, 
and she must be brought up amidst affectionate domestic 
care. She must be educated. Not that her education 
must necessarily be scientific, or literary, but it must be 
such as to enable her to write letters in a tolerably good 
hand, and read newspapers in Chinese character. There 
are some who hold that lack of cleverness in a woman 
is in itself a virtue. The observation is not unreasonable, 
for indeed a shrewd woman is a very troublesome being. 
A wife devoid of obedience and gentleness will not 
prove a good partner. Spiritual excellence is the most 
lasting attraction in a wife.' 

Moreover, as I have told you, the Japanese wife is 
expected to walk ten paces or more behind her husband 
to-day even as from time immemorial. And to-day 
she does it ; she keeps her distance. 



THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL 223 

The Women's University and the Japanese High 
School for girls are no doubt great workers for the 
Revolution. But even the wife herself begins to be 
her own ally. Lately a Japanese farmer ordered his 
spouse, the daughter of a doctor, to come into the fields 
and, — by all the Japanese powers ! — do her share of the 
work. She declined, and he incontinently divorced her 
for disobedience — that is to say, he intimated to the 
local registrar that she was no longer his wife. The 
lady demurred and claimed damages for divorce without 
sufficient cause. One court upheld the husband : the 
Supreme Court quashed their decision, and ruled that 
a wife is not under obligation to meet her husband's 
' unreasonable ' demands. So it is possible that a little 
cloud, no bigger than a woman's hand, is rising in the 
Japanese husband's prospect, and of course the Women's 
University, Tokyo, — it doesn't pray that the cloud may 
roll by. 



XXVI 
THE RECORD OF AN EXPERIENCE 

On a weeping day of September I crossed many bogs in 
the streets of Tokyo to see a great sight ; at any rate 
hoping — against some sceptic, derisive questionings — to 
see this great sight. 

You must know that there are moods which fidl 
upon all children of the West whose destiny is pro- 
longed among the children of the East — from Port 
Said to Tokyo — moods of a sudden, strenuous, terrible 
yearning, when the heart, as it were, sweats with a 
labour of heaving, with profound pulsations which come 
from the deeps, and rise even to a man's visible, watery 
eyes. This is the revolt of the Western soul ; its 
nausea ; its sickening. It is its quick, flaming insurrec- 
tion against the East — all the East, all the peoples of 
the East ; all the skies, mountains, seas of the East ; 
the sun of the East, the twilight of the East, its black 
midnight ; the very splendour of the East ; its very 
dross, A company of three men, or two, or four, are 
sitting in the verandah of the East, talking in ordinary 
conventional tones of yesterday's tennis, and the dubious 
fame of Mrs. A. and Mr. B. The thick, sticky Eastern 
night obtrudes ever the verandah balustrade, like an 
intangible wall of black gas, out of which strange 
insects appear, as yellow, wiry streaks, flashing into the 

224 



THE RECORD OF AN EXPERIENCE 225 

light of the verandah ; mosquitoes with them, atomic 
elfs of hell, blowing minute horns. The conversation 
is reasonably irregular ; a man answers his fellow after 
a decided pause ; in the quiet of the night, in the big 
silence of its great maw, into which the verandah looks, 
the human voice has an abrupt, rapping resonance 
which is unfamiliar because it is neither the resonance 
of a closed chamber nor the resonance of the open. 
The talk drifts, drags, dies ; weary, overcome. The 
eyes of the men seek the night and a star, and out of 
the star and out of the night a phantom comes. It 
may be swift, so that one man may wink at his star 
and see the phantom when the eyelid returns to its 
socket. It may be slow, so that his fellow may see it 
slowly shape and stir in the near blackness of the 
night. A word may summon it — as 'Home,' 'London,' 
' Chamberlain.' It may be the child of nothing ; the 
twinkling star may send it. This apparition is hell, 
and it is heaven. It is the phantom of the Insurrection. 
When it appears men put a hand over their eyes, and 
gird their hearts. Sometimes they move about, the 
pain being more readily softened by physical activity. 
Sometimes they thump old airs out of old pianos, with 
notes as flat as flounders from Eastern dews. It is 
men who are not long of the East who see this appari- 
tion frequently, but even to the man who has not heard 
the roar of London for thirty years, to the ' Old hands,' 
it comes, and when it comes to them, it is not unlike 
the pains of Death. To the others — to the new hands 
— it is a kind of horrible pleasure — a rack of joy, a 
thrilling crucifixion. 

Well, then, as I have said, I crossed many bogs 
in Tokyo to see a great sight. Briefly — if certain 
guarantees given me were to be fulfilled — I was about 

Q 



226 JAPAN 

to see the Apparition turned to reality — that is to say, 
stripped of its horror. Crossing the street bogs, I was 
in the mood which sees the Apparition — its visitations 
are altogether chanceful ; unconfined, for certain, to 
verandahs — and all the way I was hoping against hope 
to see it, for once, as it were, in indubitable, unqualified 
certainty. I had been led to hope that I should see 
Heaven in substance and in truth. Seeing Heaven 
otherwise is a kind of hell ; it is the apparition, and of 
that I had had much in three years. 

I was set out for the Tokyo Academy of Music at 
Ueno, and the grief and tears of the day seemed a 
premonition of sorrow — a re-vision of the old hell. 
Yet, like a good Christian, I struggled manfully with 
the quagmires of the streets of Tokyo, and of the 
Ueno grounds, deriving some comfort from the alluring 
shadow and protective majesty of Ueno's cedars. These, 
I reflected, were some compensation should I not see 
the Apparition turned to beauty. I said to myself, as 
one should say to a disappointed searcher of treasure : 
' At any rate that is a fine sky overhead.' 

With a high but doubting heart I came to the Academy 
of Music. To be sure I heard it before I saw it. I 
heard a welter of piano notes, a huddle of them, chords 
in crowds, tumbling over each other like sheep passing 
through a strait gate in a panic. This came to my 
ears. To my eyes came a quite unlovely weather-board 
building, rain-dyed to mouse colour, of a single story 
above the ground floor, with uncommonly capacious 
window frames, and perhaps three times as long as high 
— say a frontage of a hundred or a hundred and twenty 
feet. Some of the windows were thrown up. The 
welter of piano chords had issued thence. There might 
be three or four pianos going in difi^erent rooms. These 



THE RECORD OF AN EXPERIENCE 227 

sent me the flock of scales, that reached my ear an 
irregular army of discords, very terrible, sent out to 
scare me away. But I moved boldly on the Academy, 
still hopeful in spite of this manner of reception. I 
found an entrance-vestibule, concrete-floored, with walls 
of plaster, once white. Voices, calls, notes of instru- 
ments, — pianos, violins, cornets, — struggled half-dead 
through a closed door before me, and down through 
the ceiling, and along from passages to right and left, 
ending in more doors and stairs. Japanese lads, some 
in Japanese dress, others clad like myself, passed me in 
the vestibule, with ' Message ' written on their faces ; 
others trooped past in chattering bunches, moving 
doubtless to another classroom. I made my business 
known, and my authority, and soon came an instruction 

from Mr. J , ' foreign ' Principal of the Academy, 

to betake myself to the general hall. I betook myself 
accordingly — up a stair, through swinging doors. I 
was now in a theatre of some size — evidently a projection 
from the back of the building, for it was well lighted 
from the side walls. The seats rose in a tier to half 
the height of the rear wall. They looked upon a 
platform bearing an organ, a piano, and many music- 
stands. Already the Apparition — it had been hanging 
to my eyes all the dripping morning — lost some of its 
terror. I was in a small Albert Hall. What might 
not happen in an Albert Hall, even though small, even 
though here, twelve thousand miles from the Memorial ? 
What angels might not float on wings of Music even 
here — angels to overwhelm the Apparition .'' My heart 
beat high with hope. 

There was the sound of many feet and a crowd of 
Japanese young men and young women came out from 
the rooms behind the platform, and collected on it in 



228 JAPAN 

the talkative, haphazard, occasional manner of an 
assembling orchestra. They brought their instruments 
— my instruments, it seemed to me — not their horrible 
samisen and their bastard banjo, the execrable koto ; my 
instruments, the violins, the 'cellos, the cornets, flutes, 
and cymbals of my worship, the dishes of my feast. 
My heart beat higher, for there was a proper aspect of 
serious business in the whole affair. Even if the young 
women wore Japanese dress, and the majority of the 
young men, it was at once clear, from the mere 
manner of their handling my violins and cornets — pre- 
liminary to all motions towards playing them — it was 
clear that they were not charlatans or mountebanks, 
aping the arts of my race, playing with the holy fire of 
my gods, to palter and peddle with it. Clearly there 
was some proficiency and purpose in their act and 
demeanour. 

Soon my friend came, with a brisk, pleasant, familiar, 
yet authoritative manner for the young men and young 
women, and a greeting for me perched high in the tier 
of seats, ready at the end of years of the recurring 
vision of hell to smother or to worship him. With 
fair promises — the guarantees I have spoken of — he 
had tempted me to come, and I was there with these 
promises in my heart ; not now as a tolerant judge and 
well-wisher of Japan and the Japanese, but as one 
hungering for the reality of the vision, for the substance 
of that phantom of the West which had tortured my 
eyes not once or twice in a space of years. I was not 
there, it seemed, as a critic of the Japanese attempt in 
the music of Europe, but as one who had paid a price 
to be healed of an injured soul — injured by terrible 
deprivation — healed by Handel, Wagner, Mendelssohn, 
or other physician my friend might bring with him. 



THE RECORD OF AN EXPERIENCE 229 

I was not strictly competent then, nor may be at 
any time, to estimate the value of Japan's progress in 
our music. I was in a false position for any nice 
appreciation. I demanded that my appetite should 
be satisfied by my friend ; not that my palate should 
be asked to discriminate flavours and the nuances of 
musical sauces. ' Devil,' I said secretly, ' you tan- 
talise me at your peril. After these years I am 
desperate.' 

The orchestra quickly settled to place and order 
under the baton of my friend — the young women on 
his left, the young men on his right, he himself at the 

piano commanding it and them, Herr at the 

organ against the wall. I heard the violin strings 
tuned and watched the troublings and fidgetings of the 
orchestra as it prepared, my heart beating higher than 
ever. God ! may you, if you love this thing they call 
music, which in truth is unnameable, may you never 
know yourself dying of the thirst of it ! 

I saw my friend's baton poised in the air. It fell. 
I was embarked. I was upon the sea. I found myself 
speeding with incredible rapidity to the nether side of 
the globe. The wretched phantom of the morning 
went like a gun-flash. The substance of Heaven took 
its place. The apparition became sensible reality. I 
was in Europe. I was ' Home.* 

Mendelssohn's pianos, pianissimos, crescendos, fortes, 
fortissimos — the volume and stream of his dreams were 
' all heaven before mine eyes,' and I forgot or cared not 
that the media of the vision were sisters of geisha, 
tnusumes, and their brothers, pagan clog-wearers. I 
had perhaps an hour of this heaven and woke I think 
but once, shaken, startled, when the voice of a Japanese 
youth sang * O Rest in the Lord ! ' The articulation of 



230 JAPAN 

the English was clear ; the voice a good baritone, 
perhaps of a somewhat nasal quality. It was the 
eccentricity of it that surprised and awoke me — ' O Rest 
in the Lord ! ' by a son of twenty generations of pagans, 
in the heart of a land of dryad-worshippers ! But the 
chief fact is that the apparition which comes to exiles 
was changed to heaven — otherwise to Reality — for me ; 
that I was, for a time, healed. The world seemed to 
put on a new dress when I left the Tokyo Academy of 
Music ; the bogs had disappeared from the streets 
of Tokyo. I forgot the comfort of the cryptomerias 
of Ueno. I was another man. 

This is the record of a personal experience which I 
give as signification of the progress of the Revolution 
in Japanese Art. I give also Mr, J.'s facts. ' Yes,' 
said he, * we do pretty well, but it has been hard work 
in my four years. The Academy draws upon the best 
musical talent in Japan, whatever of talent there is to 
draw upon. The preliminary of admission is that the 
student shall go through a piece of music at sight. 
This means that there is organised elementary musical 
instruction in the country. The Academy students 
range in age from fourteen to twenty or twenty-one. 
Having received a five years' training here, they go out 
into the country as teachers in the elementary schools. 
An organisation is thus growing which is a replica of 
the system of musical instruction in Europe. The 
voices I get among the boys average, I should say, 
much as in the same class in Europe. I should say the 
altos of the girls are the best of all my voices. All 
the students know some English, and our musical text 
is usually in that language. European airs are, how- 
ever, adapted to Japanese text and vice versa. Songs 
or poems are composed for us, and their sentiment 



THE RECORD OF AN EXPERIENCE 231 

being explained to me, I select a suitable score. As 
Christian ideas are not at all spread among the people, 
it is impossible to find Japanese texts precisely suitable 
for our requiem and sacred music. I sometimes, how- 
ever, contrive to fit a heroic Japanese text to some of 
our religious and martial scores. The piano is the 
most popular of our instruments among the students. 
Organs are much used, however, for the " cheap organ " 
is now a Japanese manufacture.' 

One leaves the Tokyo Academy of Music in a very 
wondering frame of mind. Critically examined, it has 
at the least trained a band of Japanese young men 
and young women to render the designated notes of 
our score on designated instruments of ours. If we 
must stop short of an affirmation that it has produced 
an orchestra, there is a passable certainty of its having 
taught this band of young men and young women to 
go through all the motions of an orchestra and to 
render a remarkable vraisemblance of its sounds. I 
affirm this much from my own experience, for I do 
not believe that I was cozened during my visit to the 
Academy on a wet day in September 1902. I am 
persuaded that the visit was not a dream. 

There is no music indigenous to Japan, nor are 
there native musical instruments. This I affirm in the 
full knowledge that there is a Japanese scale of five 
notes, and that there are instruments named samisen and 
koto. I repeat, there is no music indigenous to Japan, 
nor are there musical instruments native to the country. 
Hence in this domain of Art, it is not a revolution that 
is in progress, but a creation. It is not proselytes that 
are made, but souls. Can they be made ^ Pending an 
answer from the Tokyo Academy of Music which 
might be final, I offer the remark to me of a lovable 



232 JAPAN 

but vinous virtuoso of Italy, who in a certain Japanese 
city has been striving for many years out of Japanese 
materials to make a brass band to serve the purposes of 
his fellow Europeans met for gaiety. Said he : * Zey 
have not zee hart.' Yet poor old R. has occasionally 
succeeded with his Japanese materials. 

There is, it is said, a ' foreign school ' of Japanese 
painting. One wishes it might be an unfounded rumour. 
Unfortunately you may see its work in Tokyo. A 
year or two since the Tokyo police draped all below the 
bust of one of its publicly exhibited nude studies. This 
was on behalf of public morals. Seeing others its 
studies, any of them, all of them, one feels that for the 
dearer sake of Art they should all be draped, and not 
only below the bust. Here the Revolution makes 
itself ridiculous, because I suppose it is supremely 
superfluous. 



XXVII 

MIRABEAU AND ROUSSEAU 

As a student of the Revolution I was bound to inter- 
view Marquis Ito. In France they might say of this 
man that he is the Revolution Incarnate. In truth he 
is its Mirabeau who, dying not in its infancy, has 
conducted it at the least to a healthy adolescence. He 
is no Danton, no Robespierre, no Napoleon. He is a 
Mirabeau of the epoch, who has not died untimely. 

In Japan they say practically everything of Marquis 
Ito. Probably all adjectives between ' divine ' and 
* devilish ' have been coupled with his name by his own 
countrymen, for this is part of the fate of men who in- 
carnate revolutions. Hito-tabi ashi agureha tenka ugoku 
— ' If he do but lift a foot, the whole world moves,' 
— is a tribute of his political followers, who are, as 
often as not, the nation. Two years ago his political 
lieutenant was assassinated. An able influential daily 
newspaper of Tokyo hinted, not at all darkly, that there 
was surely also a dagger about for the late lieutenant's 
chief. But the Revolution has not strangled its 
Mirabeau. 

This man, a Samurai or knight of the Feudal Age 
of Japan, closed by Imperial Ordinance thirty odd years 
ago, committed a capital offence for the good of his 
country forty years since. The Feudal Age beheaded 

233 



234 JAPAN 

men who left their native land and could be caught 
again. Marquis Ito risked it and worked a before-the- 
mast passage to London to absorb our civilisation and 
its methods. He returned to put his head to extra- 
ordinary uses. With it he conceived that enormous 
idea — the second phase of the Revolution — ^the abolition 
of the Feudal System. I have quoted his own narrative 
of that portentous conception. In his twenties he might 
scarcely be the exclusive nurse of the prodigious infant. 
But with the passing years his tutelage became more 
and more direct, more and more necessary. In the 
eighties he was father to the third great child of the 
Revolution — the Constitution, and, practically speaking, 
he has been sole tutor of this child — meaning that he 
has been preceptor and governor of the Revolution — 
since its birth. He has been four times official Prime 
Minister, and the rest of the years since the Constitution 
he has been chief of the Elder Statesmen, or unofficial 
Prime Minister. He is now sixty-three years of age. 

Plainly, I must ' interview ' Marquis Ito. So I made 
cautious inquiries and discreet overtures, feeling that 
men who incarnate Revolutions really belong to the 
heroic age which certainly would have spitted the modern 
interviewer on its knightly lance. 

In the fact an interview with the Incarnate Revolution 
was easy. He — Ito — ' would see me with pleasure at 
10.30 to-morrow forenoon.' 

At 10.30 I was seated in the narrow verandah of 
the Japanese hotel which entertained this Mirabeau of a 
Revolution during his day or two's sojourn in a pro- 
vincial city. Mirabeau was ' stumping ' the country, 
having lately organised a new party. 

Outside the world was grey and dripping. In the 
garden below me the bamboo plumes drooped like the 



MIRABEAU AND ROUSSEAU 235 

tails of bedraggled fowls. The very gold of the golden 
carp in the toy lake was tarnished ; the leaden sky and 
the rain had turned it dirty vermilion. And the carp 
nosed about without zest. It was, in fact, the Japanese 
rainy season. 

I was on the verandah of a considerable chamber — 
the guest-chamber of a first-class Japanese hotel. It 
was half open to the pallid world — two sections of the 
sliding wall being moved out of the way of my meeting 
with Mirabeau, for whom a chair, facing mine, waited 
on the verandah, emptily expectant, as it seemed. I 
waited, conscious of the oppressive vacuity of the guest- 
chamber and of the chair that faced me. This oppression 
was apprehension of the entrance of Mirabeau. A 
sliding -door squeaked. I started. It was a sallow, 
smiling youth, whose voice to the walls said, ' Marquis 
Ito will come ver' shortly,' and to me, * The Revolution 
Incarnate will appear before you very shortly.' How 
differently the ears of walls hear ! The truth of it is, 
I was agitated. 

Well, another sliding-door squeaked, and the panel- 
space left by its sliding was filled by a short, thick, 
blocky figure in the act of replacing a handkerchief in 
the tail pocket of its black cut-away morning coat. I 
rose as the figure came towards the verandah and the 
emptily expectant chair facing mine. ' Good morning, 
your Excellency,' I said, meaning, ' I hail thee, Mira- 
beau.' We shook hands, and the Man of the Japanese 
Revolution appeased the expectancy of the empty chair. 
I mean that Marquis Ito sat down. I did likewise and 
so faced the Revolution Incarnate which, I need not say, 
had returned my greeting cheerily enough, if huskily. 

The face is incommunicably Oriental. I can never 
pretend to explore it, to fathom or chart its deeps, for I 



236 JAPAN 

am Occidental. I have no symbols, signs, or science to 
apply to this face. My theodolite and trigonometry 
will not suit to survey these mountains of the moon. 
The fact is, that the insignia of Oriental character are 
not our insignia. We see a big, wide-flanged nose, and 
we say, ' Here is some element of power.' We note a 
thick, drooping under lip and we conclude, ' Here is 
sensuality or irresolution.' In Japan, in China, in Asia, 
you may meet a big nose, and meeting it may encounter 
one of the varieties of power, but it is probably a 
coincidence. It is another cipher we need in Asia ; the 
European code is no key to that cryptogram, the 
Oriental face. 

The face is incommunicably Oriental. It is, that is 
to say, a mask — to us, to me, who possess no science of 
the Oriental face. The skin is old, very old, parch- 
ment, ruddied with the blood flowing behind it. It is 
strained taut, leaving only horizontal wrinkles across a 
brow that has no perpendicular, but bends like an arch 
from the eye-sockets. It is broad and very Japanese 
with its high, protruding cheek-bones, whence it falls 
away to an inconspicuous chin to which a few hairs, 
grey and an inch long, attach by way of a Napoleon. 
These hairs are matched by a scraggy few that curl 
over or about the upper lip. The full face contour is 
that of a kite with a rather long cross-piece and a 
rounded head. 

The eyes are the only cipher I can hope to use upon 
this cryptogram. The iris is, of course, black-brown ; 
there is no other Japanese iris, for the race has never 
been crossed. The white is no longer white ; it is the 
yellow of yellow marble, reticulated with veiny streaks; 
the corners are, as it is said, blood-shot. I am not to 
interpret these signs. What I see for interpretation is 



MIRABEAU AND ROUSSEAU 237 

that the eye is both profound and unsteady. It may 
be impatience with me, a passing trifler engaging the 
Revolution Incarnate. The eye scarcely meets my 
questions ; it shifts, rolls, sends me a single shaft of 
direct vision, and then squints upon the pallid sky with- 
out. It is the lips that answer me, not the eyes. In 
the West, the eyes of the man would chiefly make 
reply to me ; here the lips are almost all the office of 
communication, and I do not know if the man's heart 
speaks. Yet, it is plain, the eyes are profound. There 
are immeasurable deeps in their intermittent shafts of 
direct vision. The Orient — Asia — is mostly incom- 
municative, wrapped in mystery. And when it bares 
its soul, it is like a vision of deep distorted sea-shapes 
disclosed at the convenient angle of a ship's roll as you 
peer over the side. The manner of Mirabeau supports 
this interpretation of his eye. It is shifting, restive, yet 
hesitating, non-committal, reserved. 

This is really all I arrive at ; the Revolution, as this 
man incarnates it, is profound and crafty. Or have, if 
you like, this string of epithets — subtle, able (the ability 
of experience upon a foundation of partially refined 
intellect), managing, suave, discreet, judging, wary, 
critical, disingenuous, self- regarding, self-respecting, 
self-knowing, wide-awake, inscrutable. Make a com- 
posite of the lot and you have Marquis Ito's eye, one 
window of the soul of the Revolution. 

You may care to know the substance of what this 
Mirabeau said, though to me his eye was much more 
important. He spoke in English, but with many 
cogitative, interrupting, uncomfortable silences, so that I 
was fain to presume to ' help out ' the Mirabeau before 
whom I had, in anticipation, trembled. ' It is true re- 
presentative government in Japan is not yet what it is in 



238 JAPAN 

England, but we are moving in the right direction. Yes ' 
[this with something of a smiling snicker] * a good many 
of oiir politicians are after the boodle ' [not Marquis 
Ito's idiom]. ' This is of necessity so. We need dis- 
interested men as leaders. The Japanese Government 
will not deviate from an attitude of strict impartiality 
vs4th regard to religions, I myself look to science, 
knowledge, culture, as a sufficient religion. We will 
continue to follow up the paths of European learning 
and inquiry. This means the continued abandonment 
of the canons and traditions of Chinese learning formerly 
followed. Our interest in China is strong. We look 
to Russia fidfiUing her pledges with regard to Man- 
churia, no doubt upon some adequate agreement or 
arrangement safeguarding her interests. England seems 
as strong as ever. She might, with patience, have built 
up a better case for action in South Africa. In some 
respects she acted precipitately, I think in ten years 
the United States will probably be the formidable Power 
of the world.' And so forth, on concerns of more 
ephemeral interest. 

I went away with a conspicuous remembrance of the 
eye of the Mirabeau of the Revolution — profound and 
crafty — undoubtedly a fine, if partial, symbolisation of 
the Revolution. 

Marquis Ito, you may care to know, is chiefly famous 
in his own land for an art of falling upon his feet, though 
he stands and has for long stood upon the highest 
pinnacles of fame and office — a situation in which his 
art might seem to be difficult of practice. 

I am now in an English drawing-room. My foot 
treads a thick, muffling carpet. I seat myself in a 
chair of the suite, high-backed, with a seat of mottled 



MIRABEAU AND ROUSSEAU 239 

brocade. The table-cover, the carpet, the brocades, are 
one colour scheme, as required by canon. The total 
effect is a yellowish-brown. There is a bay-window in 
one wall, and an ordinary window in another, with 
brocade curtains. There is a cabinet, of cedar perhaps, 
against a third wall, and there are consoles and brackets 
and whatnots, presenting specimens of Japanese faience 
and objels d' art. The master of the house is a collector 
and connoisseur. The drawing-room is certainly on the 
small side, but it is not too small for its contents. 
There is not the much that makes a litter, nor the little 
that leaves a void. There is light and luxury and art, 
ordered by taste. 

I had come — again as a conscientious student of the 
Revolution — to * interview ' Count Okuma, named the 
Rousseau of the Revolution, at Waseda among crypto- 
meria groves on the skirts of Tokyo the capital, — 
Waseda with which the name of this Count Okuma 
is automatically coupled whenever it is mentioned in 
Japan. 

Of this man it might be said that had there been no 
Marquis Ito, he might have been Marquis Ito. He 
does not incarnate the Revolution, yet of no other 
living man might it be said so truly that he ' incar- 
nates ' its spirit. There are men who are competent 
to guide, to direct, to manage great movements. There 
are other men who, in the little great empire of their 
own individualities, embody great movements — they 
are the movements, an epitome of them ; they are 
part, a great part, of the force and soul of them, the 
force and soul which the other competent men direct. 
Of such is Count Okuma in the great movement which 
I call the Japanese Revolution. Beside that of Marquis 
Ito, his constructive work of the Revolution has been 



240 JAPAN 

as nothing ; beside that of Marquis Ito, his native 
revolutionary ' soul ' is as a blazing torch to a time- 
fuse. He has been Prime Minister, and for a genera- 
tion he has been chief of a considerable party, but it is 
long since he was, so to speak, an official statesman of 
the Revolution. He cannot, it seems, manage the 
Revolution ; he only inspires it. Had there been no 
Marquis Ito he might have managed it, with a little of 
Marquis Ito's success. As it is, he inspires it even to- 
day as Marquis Ito never did and never could inspire 
it. He fills an office which not Marquis Ito nor any 
other his contemporary could fill as he does. He is 
Unofficial Adviser of the Revolution. Its politics, its 
finance, its foreign relations ; its trade and industry ; its 
religion, its education ; its art, its literature — he has no 
sphere but these. Public speech, public writing, private 
exhortation, party propaganda — he has no methods but 
these. You perceive that his sphere and his methods 
cover everything save official rule. This adviser is 
everywhere save in office ; he does everything save 
advise officially. He has no prototype in England ; 
nor, for the matter of that, has Marquis Ito. Equally 
is he a product of the Revolution with Marquis Ito ; 
yet the functions of each are no more alike than the 
habits of a beaver and a bird. Revolutions produce 
both types. 

Upon this man I waited in the English drawing- 
room of his Japanese-English villa, looking upon his 
English park at Waseda, Tokyo. He came in leaning 
upon a stick, for the Revolution, in the person of an 
obscure reactionary, inevitable vomit of an upheaval, 
threw a bomb at him fourteen or fifteen years ago, and 
with it shattered one of his legs. Even so he moved 
briskly, as if ease were not in his composition. * I 



MIR ABE AU AND ROUSSEAU 241 

wish,' I said, * to ask Count Okuma questions about 
finance and commerce ; politics, the Constitution, the 
people ; about parties, about reaction, about education ; 
religion, art, literature ; and the future.' I may have 
smiled inwardly myself. The Count, as my recital 
came upon its end, laughed a huge laugh, but good- 
natured. Then he jerked his head, as if to say, 'All 
right, go on.' 

He was in Japanese dress, black and grey, and rich. 
His face is an easier book than Marquis Ito's ; so much 
easier that it now seems but a half-truth to say that the 
physiognomical insignia of the European character are 
not those of the Asiatic. The skin of this face is putty- 
yellow — not the putty-yellow of bad health, mind you. 
The profile, it seemed to me, was very like that of 
Egyptian mummy faces I had seen. The nose has the 
arch, and there is the swiftly retreating brow of a Rameses, 
with a mouth and chin relatively unimpressive. The 
cheek-bones are again somewhat prominent. The face is 
clean-shaven. There is a meagre showing of hair on the 
temples. By token of the nose, if nothing else, clearly 
a man of force. And then the eyes — their betrayal is 
unmistakable. They meet my questions, clear, expectant, 
ready, eager ; they anticipate, they pounce upon, they 
seize my questions. This man wears his soul in his 
eyes, like other men ; but, unlike others, his eyes refuse 
no challenge. The man's manner is part of his eyes ; 
it is their harmonious setting. This Rousseau of the 
Revolution — whom, to its shame, it has maimed — as he 
takes the point of my question, bounds in his chair, to 
pour a flood of speech upon it. His crutch falls from 
his hand ; the stricken limb is forgotten, and the man 
requires to readjust himself with care when he has done. 
His every answer is a spring, a leap ; his every speech 

R 



242 JAPAN 

a torrent. Oftenest he began to reply to me betore I 
had stated the premises I allowed. It was the torrent 
that makes a revolution, without the circumspection, 
craft, and deliberation that has made Marquis Ito, and 
perhaps preserved the Revolution. 

I think I discern in the eye, the gait, the speech of 
Count Okuma, who is sixty-four, that the Revolution 
was at one time an enthusiasm, like European Revolu- 
tions. That was quite a while ago, and Count Okuma 
lies since quite a while high and dry upon an unofficial 
lee shore. The Revolution was soon required to be 
profound and crafty, and it was Marquis Ito, not 
Count Okuma, who satisfied the requisition. But 
Count Okuma is by far the more refreshing. He 
inspires ; Marquis Ito ' manages.' 

Rousseau boxed the compass of international politics. 
I think, when I introduced Japanese Finances, he recited 
to me, bewildered, the debt per head of population of 
the leading states of the world, or it may have been 
their earnings per adult male, or their savings per 
family. It may have been all three ; I am sure it 
could have been all three. On some Japanese prob- 
lems he said, ' Our Constitution has the spirit of the 
Prussian Constitution, as well as that of the British. 
England is, of course, the mother of constitutional 
government, and that being so we had to take her in 
some degree as a model ; but the English idea is more 
or less mixed with the German in our Constitution. 
Our people, however, as yet are deficient in their idea 
of their rights and responsibilities in politics. Time 
will improve them in that respect, although it cannot 
accomplish everything. What we need mostly, greatly, 
is education. Only by education can our people acquire 
just ideas of their rights and responsibilities under the 



MIRABEAU AND ROUSSEAU 243 

Constitution. Thirty years ago we scarcely knew what 
education was. Our educational system, although it is 
not yet equal to that of the United States, Germany, or 
France, is yet far superior to that of Italy or Spain, or 
even Australia. Its results are manifest in our Army. 
Our success against China was due, of course, to the 
personal courage of our soldiers, but it was also, in part, 
due to the development of our educational system. If 
they had been as lacking in education as the Chinese 
mass, our troops would not have been half so successful 
as they were. When conscription was first adopted by 
us most of our soldiers were illiterate ; now many of 
the annual draft of conscripts are well educated, and 
almost all of them can read and write. And in the 
thirty years to come we hope to accomplish much more 
than we have done in the thirty years past, much as 
that has been. I do not look for the complete Euro- 
peanisation of our country in the future. We shall 
continue to develop a civilisation peculiar to ourselves, 
compounded of our own and that of Europe. As 
European civilisation is more and more introduced, our 
own will more and more develop with it and through 
it. It is in the present time that the two civilisations 
are being welded. The fusion is most remarkable in 
our Literature and Art. As the process goes on it 
will be seen that our Literature and Art are not to be 
totally annihilated, but that they will develop side by 
side with the increasing introduction of foreign litera- 
ture and foreign Art.' 

The Rousseau and the Mirabeau of the Revolution 
make a fine pair. They are its soul and its mind, its 
spirit and intellect, heart and judgment, enthusiasm and 
craft. 



XXVIII 

WITH THE HIGH PRIESTS OF JAPANESE 
BUDDHISM 

In the autumn of the year 1900 Japanese Buddhism 
did a unique thing. 1900 was the black, momentous 
year of Chinese destinies, the year of the siege of the 
Embassies of the civilised world in the Chinese capital. 
It is history now ; dark, bloody ; and its sombre gloom 
is scarcely relieved by the Christian conduct of the 
troops of the Allies in the campaign of rescue, nor 
mayhap in the penal operations following the Relief. 
A uniquely red or black year in China's history, it 
furnished the occasion of a unique act of Japanese 
Buddhism. 

At the newspaper offices in Japan we were curiously 
surprised, one morning of the November of that purple 
year, when we tore the wrapper from a pamphlet, 
delivered with the diurnal shoal of ' exchanges,' and 
read upon its paper cover this title — 

A CIRCULAR 

in connection with 

THE CHINESE EMERGENCY 
(For all the ecclesiastics in the world). 

The superscription made us curious, the contents and 

244 



THE HIGH PRIESTS OF BUDDHISM 245 

subscription curiously surprised us. The first paragraph 
of the contents began : ' We, the Buddhists of Great 
Japan, beg to inform our revered ecclesiastical brethren 
in the world that the disturbances in China having now 
reached their climax, her national prestige is at stake,' 
etc., and it ended with this question : * How is it 
possible for us [that is, ' We, the Buddhists of Great 
Japan,' and * our revered ecclesiastical brethren in the 
world '], who have pledged ourselves to undertake the 
work of salvation, to remain silent with folded hands ^ ' 
— all in clear, excellent English. The subscription, at 
the end of thirteen octavo pages, was — 

GenkS Nakayama, 

Superintendent of the Tendai Sect. 

liikyo Ch5, 

Representatives of the I Superintendent of the Shingon Sect. 

Great Japan Bud- 1 „,-.... 

J, . ^ , TT • ^1 Kodo Hisata, 

dhists Union, at . , , . . , , ^ , ^ , o 

. I Superintendent of the Hieizan branch of the Jodo Sect. 

their Headquarters J 

within the Kenninji \ Dokutan Toyoda, 

Temple in Kyoto I Superintendent of the Nanzenji branch of the 
Empire of Great j ^'"^^^ S"*' 

Japan. | Koei Otani, 

Superintendent of the Otani branch of the Shin Sect. 

Korin Yoshi, 
Superintendent of the Obaku Sect 

We were first curious, then curiously surprised. In 
this frame of mind we wrote our ' leaders,' in effect 
pointing out the unique thing Japanese Buddhism had 
done. Japanese Buddhism was claiming, or seeking a 
place, or, by warrant of this, its ' Circular . . . for all 
the ecclesiastics in the world,' was making a move to 
capture a place among the world -forces of the time. 
You might view the Circular so, or you might laugh 
at it and lay it aside. Strangely, the same alternative 



246 JAPAN 

oiFers with regard to other phenomena of the New Era 
in Japan : you feel in a kind of quandary whether to 
hail an Epochal Fact or to laugh at a quixotic antic. It 
was somewhat so as to the ' Circular . . . for all the 
ecclesiastics in the world.' In our leaders we made a 
compromise of it ; we said the Circular might be worth 
the attention of Christendom as a sign ; we paid a 
sincere compliment to the excellence of the Japanese 
writers' facility in the English language. 

It is of interest to note that a formal salutatory 
response to the Circular was made by a council of the 
Presbyterian Churches of the United States of America. 
Rome, I think, passed it by. Convocation, I fear, did 
not mention it. It is now, I suppose, forgotten by ' all 
the ecclesiastics in the world,' to whom it was historic- 
ally — or quixotically — addressed. For my part, I 
went to Kyoto to ' interview ' its authors, to interview 
Japanese Buddhism, to meet its Highest Priests, to 
question them of their Interest, their Authority, their 
Miracles. With a meek purpose of seeking light, I 
constituted myself Ambassador -Extraordinary from 
Christendom to the powers of this Japanese Buddhism 
which invited Christendom to join hands with it for the 
'salvation' — the spiritual salvation, mark you — of China, 
perishing. 

Now, when you go to Japan you will not fail to 
visit Kyoto. In fact, you will not have visited Japan 
if you shall not have visited Kyoto. True, of other 
places I might say somewhat the same — of Nikko, of 
Shoji, of Nara. Still, of Kyoto let me specially say it — 
in italics as it were — you will not have seen, you will 
not have visited Japan, if you shall not have seen, have 
visited, Kyoto. And, ah me ! when you have seen it, 
memories of it will haunt you to your grave, not as 



THE HIGH PRIESTS OF BUDDHISM 247 

forbidding spectres, but as after-visions of joy. It is 
a fine thing to put memories in the bank for the 
comfort of declining years. As for me, I have selected 
the site of the abode of my age on the slopes of 
Hieizan, the mountain that looks on this, my Mara- 
thon, 

Tokyo is the capital of Japan to-day ; Kyoto was 
the capital yesterday, a yesterday of eleven hundred 
years. Of Tokyo to-day you might say that it is 
infatuated with its modernity ; of Kyoto, that it is 
in love with its ancientness. In Tokyo there is Japan's 
Present — eager, energetic, incongruous. In Kyoto 
there is Japan's Past — placid, picturesque, inconse- 
quent. In Tokyo the temples — that is to say. Old 
Japan — are the side-shows ; in Kyoto they are the 
city. In Toko they persist. They are the life of 
Kyoto. Kyoto is Old Japan, with growing echoes 
of the New. Tokyo is New Japan, with dying echoes 
of the Old. But Kyoto does not yet muse all the day, 
as Tokyo does not yet all the day make syllogisms. 
Kyoto is not yet mere reminiscence, not yet the Old 
Japan which merely contemplates ; as Tokyo is not 
yet the New Japan which merely reasons. Both are 
yet alive and vigorous, but each in its own way and 
to its own ends. In Kyoto there is yet the colour 
and the spirit of the old life ; in Tokyo there is the 
spirit and the colour of the new. Kyoto was the 
Japanese capital yesterday ; it is still the capital of 
Japan's yesterday, that glorious, many-tinted, irrele- 
vant, iridescent Yesterday when the Japanese Samurai 
beheld his soul in the sheen of a dirk, and, the while 
he toyed with a fair lady, looked for the why of things 
in the how. 

Yet there is a long spacious railway station at 



248 JAPAN 

Kyoto, with crowds of porters in scuffy blue army cloth 
and peaked caps. There are hotel boots in red caps — 
whence akaboshi, meaning the ' red hats ' ; there are 
book-stalls and refreshment bars ; a left-luggage office 
and bawling sweetmeat boys. In short, there is a 
horrible modern railway station at Kyoto, because 
Kyoto is on the main trunk line laid along the 
sinuous body of Japan like the vermicular vertebrae 
of a snake. But Kyoto, as it were, can't help the 
modern railway station, confound it ; so she ignores 
it, or tries to. In point of fact, the railway station 
lies just outside the limits of the city proper, as if 
Kyoto could tolerate it only as an extramural nuisance 
imposed upon her by New Japan and its madness. 
Kyoto tolerates the railway station, but at a distance, 
and never, by all her temple gods, never nearer her 
heart than the hem of her garment. She allows the 
New Era only the importance of an echo — an echo of 
its railway station. 

You rattle away from Kyoto's railway station on 
your jinrikisha into another Age, another Era — Japan's 
Yesterday, of which, as I say, Kyoto is the capital. 

We arrived in the evening, as a cold December 
dusk was closing down upon the city, upon Japan's 
Yesterday. Kyoto's encircling mountains loomed low 
and distant, black-green, a dark toothed horizon-belt, 
wherever we looked beyond the city, 

'Hibiya!' ejaculated my jinrikisha- man — as if 
scarcely to me — and he whisked a sweat rag over his 
brow and cheeks, ruddy and wet. The hotel mistress 
was already curtseying, and my Japanese chaperone 
returned her greetings, which were chiefly smiles, as is 
the manner of your Old Japanese hostess. The hostess 
looked at me and smiled. Then another word with 



THE HIGH PRIESTS OF BUDDHISM 249 

my chaperone and a laugh ; then a bow to me and 
a smile ; then a smiling exclamation to a plump 
kitchen-table-housemaid at her elbow ; then back to 
the beginning with a remark to my chaperone, and 
through the formulary again to another exclamation 
(with smile) to the plump kitchen-table-housemaid, 
whose face bore a deep-printed, as it were, indelible 
smile. ' A foreigner come to stay the night at my 
hotel. Such an honour ! To overlook my shameful 
unworthiness, and the disgraceful appearance and situa- 
tion of the house ! ' — and she smiled and curtsied. The 
Japanese landlady recommends her house to you by 
stigmatising it as a piggery. She approves herself by 
allusions to her friends the pigs. And, strangely, it is 
all deeply genuine here in Kyoto, capital of Japan's 
Yesterday, where the heart of the old, kindly, gentle, 
considerate, tactful, gracious, complimentary, illogical, 
happy Japan beats warm and strong. I would not say 
as much of Yokohama, scarcely even of Tokyo. The 
deeper you penetrate into barbarian Japan the sweeter 
the manners, the finer the graces you encounter. Only 
barbarian Japan does not reason. The social system 
there is built upon another theory of life than ours — 
than that of New Japan. Barbarian Japan laughs for 
life. 

Well, well, I had come to Kyoto not to moralise 
upon Japan's regretful, unregretted past, but to inter- 
view its modern Buddhism upon its * Circular to all the 
ecclesiastics of the world.' 

Before we set out, K , my chaperone, and I had 

some thimblefuls of tea, with castira cake for me. 
The plump maid knelt beside us, nominally to see that 
we lacked for nothing, really to give her indelible smile 
expression in many giggles. The ice being broken, I 



250 JAPAN 

said it was a cold night. She laughed. I said Kyoto 
was a pretty town. She laughed loud. I remarked 
that the tea was worm. Her sides shook. You see, 
as I have hinted, there is no logic in the laugh of Old 
Japan. It is part of its theory of life to laugh — at 
least to smUe — when you shall remark that hair grows 
upon the head, or that dogs have four legs. So the 
plump maid laughed when I said the weather was cold. 
Very literally, Old Japan dies laughing. As literally 
it lives laughing. 

The moon was risen as we crossed the \%'ide courts 
of the Higashi-Hongwangi, temple of temples in 
Kyoto, because, completed in 1895, it is of this Japanese 
Age of Revolution, and because it would be a marvel 
of any Japanese age. Its huge roof cast a black 
pyramidal shadow on the moonlit court. The shadow 
was deep, and the silence deeper. Not a spangle of 
human light blinked anywhere in the mass of the 
temple, high or low, and the black court-enclosing walls, 
with their Japanese eave-copings, menaced me, like 
grim bastion-curtains, on every side. The exhilaration 
of adventure thrilled me. And truly, as I found, I was 
about to cross swords \^-ith the High Priests of Eastern 
thought and ritual ; but they were dialectic swords. 

The voice of my chaperone rang loud on the tace of 
the silence, like a footfall on the flags of a silent railway 
station, when he exchanged greetings \\ith the cicerone 
of the temple at a door within the black shadow. ' Yes, 
the honourable foreigner was expected, and all things 
were ready.' We removed our shoes and followed the 
old man, carrying a sputtering candle, along narrow 
verandah-corridors and through matted chambers to 
one wherein was a baize-covered table and four chairs, 
concessions to me, Ambassador-Extraordinary from 



THE HIGH PRIESTS OF BUDDHISM 251 

Christendom to Japanese Buddhism, self-constituted, yet 
I hope sincere. 

Here were two young men, my expected High 
Priests. I might have looked to meet Aarons. Two 
acolytes, as it seemed, fronted me. But they were 
indeed the plenipotentiaries delegated by Japanese 
Buddhism to answer to me of the authority and miracles 
of the Faith which, a week or two before, had addressed 
the Christian world in a Circular admonishing it to 
truer sacrifice and a purer conscience in the religious 
assault upon China. They were young, scarcely thirty, 
with faces of Oriental or Japanese intelligence, which is 
not ours. One was eager and interested. The other 
was chiefly a suppressed guffaw, which broke its frail 
bonds a score of times before we had done. They 
were joint authors of the ' Circular,' at the direction 
of the highest priests of Japanese Buddhism. 

In the fit gloom of the chamber, whose flickering 
candlelight, shed from the baize-covered table, threw 
bobbing, elusive shadows of our heads and shoulders 
high up among the cornice beams, we discussed together 
questions of life and death ; but often the suppressed 
guffaw made a burlesque of it. When you ask a priest 
if he be willing to give his life for his truth, it is a queer 
thing if he say * Yes ' with a giggle. They smoked 
their little Japanese pipes. This might not be improper. 
But a giggle with the speech of a potential martyr is a 
living paradox. I ought, I suppose, to have remembered 
that I was in Japan, and in the Old Japan at that. 

' We were first prompted to write the Circular,' 
they said, ' by religious motives. Our statesmen are 
promoting the position and prestige of Japan politically, 
so that now she is one of the leading Powers, and in 
fact the leading Power in the East. It seemed to us 



252 JAPAN 

that we should make an effort to bring Japan to the 
front in religious enterprise. We hear that Christianity 
is labouring all over the world for the good of society, 
and with shame of our past neglect to take our part in 
the work, we now desire to co-operate with Christianity. 
Yes, we have studied Christian ethics, but we remiun 
satisfied with our own. Buddhist doctrine greatly 
resembles the ideas of the Pi!^n/;i\< Progrc'ss, and, to 
our thinking, Christianity and Buddhism might be 
brought to work in harmony. The whole world might 
be brought under the influence of an alliance between 
Buddhism and Christianity.' 

We came rapidly upon points of dogma or quasi- 
dogma. Buddha and Buddhism had their Universal 
Benevolence, even as Christ and Christianity had their 
' Do unto others as you would be done bv.' Buddha 
died to the world, even as Christ. He who might have 
been Emperor or King (so said they) drank from the 
deep well of the world's sorrow. For Buddha's Uni- 
versd Benevolence his priests had died even as Christian 
martyrs, and they who spoke to me of these things 
were willing to do likewise. Then, or a little before, 
or a little later, one of the pair failed to contain himself. 
Of course he had manners enough to laugh to the wall, 
but it was very strange. 

Then to some of the charges of the ' Circular,' as 
the allegation that Christian missionaries in China 
mingled their ostensible aims with political machina- 
tions. ' Well,' said they, ' we do not suspect Christian 
missionary bodies of political plots, but there is some 
evidence to show that the missionaries themselves 
are prone to suborn the influence of Ministers and 
Consuls to the purposes of their propaganda. We 
[" the Buddhists of Great Japan "] have no intention of 



THE HIGH PRIESTS OF BUDDHISM 253 

trenching upon politics. We desire only to propagate 

Huddhistic doctrine in China, and thereby attempt, with 
the agents of Christianity, to uplift China and the world. 
We have no design or purpose of supporting the Japanese 
Government in any of its political enterprises in China 
or elsev/here, though we may follow it with our work 
of disseminating the saving truths of Buddhism. 

' Oh no, (they replied to pointed questions of mine), 
we do not profess that our work in Japan is complete. 
We have much to do here, and in these times we hope 
to bring our teaching more into line with the science 
and thought of Europe, now so abundantly prevailing 
in Japan. Yet we hold that Buddha's Universal Benevo- 
lence is an active living influence in the lives of our 
fellow-countrymen. The power of Buddhism is strong 
and widespread in Japan. You cannot pass hostile 
judgment upon it by instancing the status of women in 
the country, or by calling in evidence the corrupt lives 
of some of its priests. The one fact appertains to our 
social custom and tradition, and the weakness of par- 
ticular priests is not a condemnation of the gospel of 
their faith. 

* We have nothing but good-will for the Christian 
missionaries in Japan. There is absolute religious 
toleration here, and we desire nothing else. We wish 
to work with them in harmony, for ends which we 
believe to be in the end identical with theirs.' 

Yet always, or frequently, there was the suppressed 
guffaw of one of the pair to bring me back half un- 
consciously to the mood of dilemma in which the 
* Circular ' put us when it came to our hands, — Epochal 
Fact, or Quixotic Antic .? 

I leave it so. The conscience and heart of Buddhism 
is to me, to us, the unfathomed deep of a strange sea. 



254 JAPAN 

I have given its Japanese voice and profession to me in 
these times of Japanese Revokition, What can I do 
more ? What but wait for the morrow with the rest 
of the world ? 

In the morning I returned to my high priests of 
Japanese Buddhism, now old friends, as it seemed. 
They showed me their temple, marvel, as I have said, 
of this Japanese age. ' The rebuilding of this grand 
temple was a strictly popular enterprise,' says the 
guide-book. ' All the surrounding provinces contri- 
buted their quota, over a million yen (^^ 100,000) in 
all, while many peasants, considering gifts in kind to be 
more honourable, and, as it were, more personal than 
Shifts in money, presented timber or other materials. 
The timbers were all lifted into place by twenty-nine 
gisantic hawsers made of human hair.' 

They showed me the hawsers. I wonder if I may 
swear, having seen them, that my high priests were 
right to say that Buddhism is, by evidence of the 
hawsers, a power in the hearts of the Japanese ; or should 
I make a jest of it, and say that it hath assuredly a 
powerful effect upon their heads. I might at least 
plead, in extenuation, that one of the priest-authors of 
the famous ' Circular . . . for all the ecclesiastics of 
the world' made a jest of some of my most poignant 
questions to him thereanent. 



XXIX 

CREEDS VIEWED OBJECTIVELY 

Revolutions unsettle men's minds and excuse a 
plethora of philosophies and their eccentricity. By 
this token the Japanese upheaval challenges a leading 
place among revolutions. It achieves somewhat more 
than honourable distinction. It demands, I imagine, 
that it be at the least bracketed first. 

In a leading Japanese magazine-review of October 
1902 I read an article, 'Japan's Progress and her 
Mission in the World ' (in English and Japanese), a 
paragraph of which says : ' By way of finding out what 
a strong assimilative power is possessed by the Japanese, 
we call the reader's attention to a rather dry list of 
philosophers and their systems which in one form or 
other have followers in Japan : — The Ionian, the Italian, 
the Eleatic Schools ; the Atomists, the Sophists ; Socrates, 
Plato, Aristotle ; the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Sceptics, 
Neo-Platonists, Gnostics, Schoolmen ; Descartes, Male- 
branche, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, 
Berkeley, Hume, Helvetius, Kant, Fichte, Shelling, 
Schopenhauer, Herbert, Hegel, Hartmann, Diehring, 
Lange, Comte, Mill, Spencer.' Moreover, it is in- 
genuously added : ' Not being entirely satisfied with 
these systems, there are numbers of Japanese speculative 
thinkers who, retiring from active society, are spending 

255 



256 JAPAN 

their time and energy in producing new forms of philo- 
sophy.' 

Japan — the Revolution — having proved all that 
Europe has to give in philosophies, is intent on 
formulating one of her own ; nay, more than one : 
she spends ' time and energy in producing new forms 
of philosophy.' Inquire a little further and you find 
that Japan to herself proposes a more extraordinary 
thing ; she proposes to Orientalise Christianity. ' Every 
man his own philosopher ' is at length permissible among 
us ; * Every man his own Christ ' is a long, long way 
ahead of us. Yet it is the same thing when you grasp 
the Japanese point of view — I mean the point of view 
of the men who direct the Revolution. 

Incidentally what a promise, at any rate what an 
entertainment, is here ! ' Not being entirely satisfied 
with these systems ; ' discontented, that is, with the 
thought and speculation of all the ages and all their 
sages, from Plato to Spencer, the Japanese Revolution 
spends time and energy in producing new forms of 
philosophy . ' Let us incidentally admire this fine courage ; 
the East, mayhap, hath not yet ceased to send us wonders. 
Who knows but that this is the People that will show 
us the new order of life, the People of the true funda- 
mental originality, the children of undiscovered pre- 
cocities, of unsuspected and undreamt shapes of thought 
and opinion, lying deep in the womb of the human 
spirit-mind ? 

You wish to understand the religious, or ethico- 
religious, mind and attitude of the New Japan ? Well, 
it is not difficult, though I profess to speak only my 
isolated and individual opinion. 

Recall the working theory of the Revolution — the 
law of arithmetical progression, from externals, or, if 



CREEDS VIEWED OBJECTIVELY 257 

you like, from trousers, inwards, to the fountain of 
dreams, or, if you like, the imponderable soul of man. 
By inference of this law, the Revolution must have 
accomplished nothing, or next to nothing, of change in 
the soul of Japan, and the evidential facts support the 
hypothesis of my adventurous theory. In the republic 
of the soul — assuming such — of forty of the forty-five 
millions — upon a moderate estimate — the old gods. 
Buddhistic, Shintoistic, rule with a scarcely diminished 
authority. In the soul of four and a half millions of the 
remaining five there is perhaps a compromise — a compro- 
mise between the ancient gods and the doubts imported 
by the Revolution along with science and parliamentary 
institutions. In the soul of two hundred thousand of 
the ultimate half-million it is a compromise 'twixt all 
gods and a stoic or perplexed indifference. Label one 
hundred and fifty thousand professed Christians, and 
the final remnant parcel into one hundred thousand 
who deceive themselves if they think they believe any- 
thing, and fifty thousand who worship Reason and 
amuse themselves on occasion with ' the production of 
new philosophies.' Do this and the tale is complete ; 
you have analysed and classified the worships, faiths^ 
beliefs, doubts, scepticisms of the Japan of the Revolu- 
tion. 

Yet it is certain that but a few years ago Christianity 
rose upon a tide of high favour to the highest Japanese 
circles, so that there was some talk and even some 
expectation of its formal enacted adoption as the State 
religion. All speculations as to the religious future of 
Japan — as to the whole future of the Revolution indeed 
— are conditioned by this fact, and the idiosyncrasy 
which it signifies, an idiosyncrasy which is both native 
and acquired, born, that is, of the Revolution. This 



258 JAPAN 

idiosyncrasy strangely means that the soul of Japan is 
apt to be carried away by its eyes ; that the depths of 
its spiritual seas are liable to be phenomenally visited by 
the froth and foam of their surface ; that the rocks of 
its being may be undermined by its tears. In a word, 
it is not easy to say where is the soul of Japan, or what 
things are its peculiar, permanent concern. Japan asks : 
Why should religion be the soul of man, or theologies 
its one peculiar and permanent concern ? ' My soul,' 
Japan says, ' may be my Art, and why should not 
theologies be merely my entertainment, the amusement 
of my idle hours ? ' And who will answer fitly ? You 
are, in fact, again come upon the Japan which is to us 
inexplicable. 

So, while it is not difficult to understand the religious, 
or ethico-religious mind of the New Japan, it is yet, in 
a superior or inferior sense, impossible. The fifty 
thousand who, of the forty - five millions, worship 
Reason, and peradventure spin philosophies, make it 
easy ; the unknown Japanese soul makes it impossible. 
The fifty thousand are the Revolution ; they direct and 
mould it. They and the Japanese nation are the Japanese 
soul, which is unknown ; which, I doubt, knows not 
itself 

You have to understand, then, that Japan's Revolu- 
tion, in so far as it is a triumph, is a triumph of Reason, 
naked, sharp, and cold, as the blade of a sword. This at 
once explains the attitude and mind of its leaders, dead 
and alive, towards creeds and religions. That attitude 
and that mind are expressed by Marquis Ito's ' Science, 
knowledge, culture — education — are my religion for 
Japan.' Marquis Ito is the pre-eminent man of the 
Revolution. 

Remark that this attitude does not exclude or preclude 



CREEDS VIEWED OBJECTIVELY 259 

an admission of the utility or even the necessity of a 
faith or of faiths. The highest testimony witnesses 
that priesthoods are indispensable to the frame of states 
that would be great. The Japanese leaders admit so 
much, with an implication that it must be admitted be- 
cause humanity is frail and the human mind as yet afraid 
of its own unaided interpretations of the great enigmas. 
The greatest teacher and trainer of the mind of the New 
Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi, dead but two years ago, 
whose withering clearness of intellect and impregnable 
serenity of spirit placed him among the great of the Age, 
defined his own position and that of the Revolution in 
an aphorism and his defence of it. ' Religion is like 
tea,' he said, ' and its purveyors are like tea-merchants. 
You choose the tea whose flavour you like best, and 
you buy from the tea-merchant who sells it.' His reply 
to criticism of the aphorism, chiefly from foreign 
Christian religionists, was : * You suppose that I make an 
attack upon religion itself. Nothing was further from 
my intention. I have said plainly that I am not a 
believer in any religion, yet in spite of this, I have for 
many years emphasised the importance of propagating 
religion among my countrymen, recognising as I do that 
it is one of the things men need in order to get through 
Hfe.' So he frequently exhorted his compatriot Buddhist 
priests to purge their unclean lives and preach truth, 
which to the people was saving, though to him a lie. 

Take again a fuller display of Marquis Ito's view 
and intent. Five years ago was mooted a reorganisation 
of the national education on a religious basis. Here is 
a Japanese interviewer's report of Marquis Ito's observa- 
tions : ' He did not hesitate to dismiss the rumour as a 
baseless fabrication. That religious votaries should 
endeavour to push their evangelical efforts in every 



26o JAPAN 

direction, educational or political, was intelligible enough. 
But it would be the height of folly for educationists to 
invoke the aid of religion. . . . The modern progress 
of Japan was, in his opinion, due among other things to 
the fact that all religious entanglements had been wisely 
avoided in the domains of education and politics. 
" Look," said he, " look at those Oriental countries 
which are still in a state of religious bondage. Do we 
not observe in those countries that religious prejudice 
still constitutes a fatal barrier to the introduction of an 
intelligent system of administration ? Do those among 
us who would have religion introduced into the field of 
education desire to follow in the footsteps of the back- 
ward countries of the East ? " He did not mean to say 
that religion should be banished altogether from society ; 
the people were perfectly free to believe and profess any 
form of religion, only — . . .' with re-affirmation of the 
drastic and sufficing efficiency of Education, pure and 
undefiled. 

' In the view of the ruling classes, religion is a second- 
ary affair. The important thing is to conserve the 
national morality, which inculcates love of country, 
loyalty to the Sovereign, filial piety, family harmony, 
respect for parents, goodwill among sons and daughters, 
the worship of ancestors, etc. These are civic and 
family observances, not religious. This moral system 
limits its aims to this world, and its practice contemplates 
no celestial reward.' ^ 

The religion of the Revolution is not. then a Religion, 
but a civic and family morality, with an admission of 
the uses, probably good, of explicit creeds and fleshly 
priesthoods among the unlearned. As the writer I have 

^ Leyapon: Essai sur les Masurs et les Institutions [ic^oi). By I. Hitomi, a 
Japanese. 



CREEDS VIEWED OBJECTIVELY 261 

just quoted adds : ' They [the Revolution] nevertheless 
recognise the need of supernatural faiths among the 
people ; but, for themselves, they are content to follow 
Reason and Conscience.' The fifty thousand who are 
the Revolution and the New Japan worship Reason, 
spin philosophies for intellectual exercise or the advance- 
ment of learning, and view all religions objectively, 
without passion, bias, or interest. In your estimate of 
the religious attitude of the Japan of to-day they and 
their mind must be held pre-eminently important. It 
is chiefly they who, recognising the utilities of creeds 
and priesthoods in progressive polities, would, with a 
fine daring, OrientaHse Christianity ; or, mayhap, with 
equal originality, Europeanise the native Buddhistic 
Shintoism. What if they have stumbled upon a new 
deep truth — that Religion is Race, — that ethnology 
holds the key to the propagation of faiths ? Who 
knows ? Agnostic with a great calm and a final satis- 
faction, the Revolution thus agitates itself upon a 
question of * the religion for Japan.' * Creeds are 
foolishness,' it says ; ' but the people love and ^need 
follies ; so let us prescribe for them a foolishness.' It 
is like the Revolution to treat, almost as if it were a 
jest, that sublime preoccupation which to us, their 
exemplars, expresses all the height and all the depth of 
Life. 

* I have but ten minutes to catch my train for South- 
ampton,' said a Japanese, leaving England in a hurry to 
become Minister of Education in his own country, 
to Max Miiller years ago in Oxford, — * I have but ten 
minutes to catch my train. We want a new religion 
for the people in Japan. What religion shall we adopt .? ' 
This is the Revolution's question, with ten minutes to 
catch its train of affairs of real importance. Its own 



262 JAPAN 

reply is sometimes a Japanese Christianity, sometimes 
an improved Buddhism, sometimes a brand-new creed 
from somewhere. 

And, note you, even Japan's professed Christians 
intend and schematise a Japanese or Oriental Christianity. 
One, Mr. Shimada Saburo, editor of a great Tokyo 
daily, who discussed the gravest affairs with me, with 
our heads at a few inches from the ink-rollers of his 
newspaper's Hoe machine — no other where was there 
peace for talk in the republic of noise, dirt, and 
disorder, that is called a newspaper office in Japan — 
this Mr. Shimada Saburo, a professed Christian and — 
greater rarity — a politician of purity and eminence, 
writes : • The Christianity that gains the hearts and 
minds of the people of Japan will be our own, a 
Japanese Christianity, It will not be exactly like that 
of England, or of the United States. Just as we 
have united the Benevolence of Confucius and the 
Mercy of Buddha, and have made a product peculiar 
to Japan, so Christianity will be tinged with the 
national characteristics.' Says a Japanese newspaper : 
* Christianity has been Anglicised and English intel- 
lectual qualities have not by one iota been affected 
thereby. In the same way, Christianity, of whatsoever 
description, will first have to become "Japanised" 
before Japan can be Christianised.' And another 
journal conveniently enumerates the following five 
' essential qualifications ' for Japan's future religion : — 
(i) It should be scientific; (2) it should be ethical; 
(3) it should be cosmopolitan ; (4) it should be philo- 
sophical ; (5) it should be corrective. 

The truth is quite apparent. The Revolution, and 
even some influential Japanese Christianity, viewing 
Christianity and all religions, takes, as by instinct, the 



CREEDS VIEWED OBJECTIVELY 263 

objective attitude and mind. And all the time the 
earnest Christian missionary is subjective. * Make no 
doubt,' says he or she, ' Japan will be won, must be 
won, for Christianity.' On one side there is the 
intellectual and ' racial ' view of religion, on the other 
there is religion viewed by faith, by itself, by the 
a priori judgments of that psychic phenomenon, 
absolute belief. I do not declare for one point of 
view or the other ; I am hopeful only of making 
faithful report of the facts. 

And pending the decision of the objective, highly 
philosophical debate of the Revolution dilettantes, 
upon the Religion for the People, the forty millions 
contentedly, laughingly pray to the innumerable calendar 
of their Buddhistic-Shintoistic hero-gods and goblins. 
A competent Japanese writer, inquiring if the religious 
beliefs of the people of Japan have changed, whether 
the old superstitions still hold the fort of the popular 
mind in the new era, finds that there is little change. 
* Among the ignorant,' says he, ' such Buddhist 
divinities as Mida (Amida), Kwannon, Yakushi, and 
Dainichi, are habitually worshipped. . . . Those who 
wish to be rich serve Daikokuten, Benten, Bishamon, 
Ebisu, or Uga-no-kami. Those who fear the work 
of the devil serve Fudo. Those who desire lovers 
pray to Kangiten and Aizen. Those who wish for 
fame serve Dai-itoku ; those who wish to bring up 
children and grandchildren aright, Kishibojin ; those 
who fear fires, Atago, or the god of Mount Akiha ; 
those who fear the fires of hell, Jizo and Emma. . . . 
Prayer is all of a kind, either against misfortune or 
for happiness.' These old gods are worshipped — I 
mean deprecated — in a hundred thousand temples, and 
at unnumbered little shrines by wayside and mountain 



264 JAPAN 

path, little shrines upon whose enticing picturesqueness 
all the world has long been wholly agreed. 

Withal, mark that the Revolution has somewhat 
aroused Japanese Buddhism from its ancient torpor, 
and thereby, as much as by its own proud attachment 
to Reason, has placed against the destiny of subjective 
Christianity in Japan a very large point of interroga- 
tion, of which, of course, subjective Christianity is 
unconscious. 

And, in the end, it is perhaps a question whether 
the atmosphere, the proper element, the true food and 
sustenance, of the soul of Japan be religion and the 
supernatural — our religion and our supernatural. 



XXX 

THE PSYCHIC LINK? 

Japanese statesmen-philosophes — the potters at the 
wheel of the Revolution — do their day's work — their 
era's work^ — under the sole foremanship of Reason, 
and in the evening they play at stitching a crazy- 
work creed for the People, who gape for altar-cloths. 
Meanwhile the nation, statesmen, philosophes, people, 
worship the Imperial ancestors and their own. Here 
the Western mind pauses, or moving forward, is lost 
in the shadowed windings of an Oriental labyrinth. 
Let me quote — that is to say, let the Japanese mind 
lead us, blind, to the heart of this labyrinth, and leave 
us there dumbfounded : — 

' There are two sacred places in every Japanese 
house : ^ the Kamidana^ or " god-shelf," and the 
Butsudan, or *' Buddhist Altar." The first-named is 
the Shinto altar, which is a plain wooden shelf. In 
the centre of this sacred shelf is placed a Taima, or 
O-nusa (great offering), which is a part of the offerings 
made to the Daijingu of Ise, the temple dedicated 
to Amaterasu Omi-Kami, the First Imperial Ancestor. 
The Taima is distributed from the Temple of Ise to 
every house in the Empire at the end of each year, 

^ From Ancestor-Worship and Japanese Law, by Nobushige Hozumi, Professor 
of Law in the Imperial University of Tokyo ; also of the Middle Temple, Italics, 
capitals, etc., are given as in the original, w^hich is in English. 

265 



266 JAPAN 

and is worshipped by every loyal Japanese as the 
representation of the First Imperial Ancestor. On 
this altar the oftering of rice, s;ike (liquor brewed from 
rice) and branches of sakaki-tree (deyera japoiiica) are 
usually placed, and every morning the members of the 
household make reverential obeisance before it by 
clapping hands and bowing ; while in the evening 
lights are ;ilso placed on the shelf. On this shelf is 
placed, in addition, the charm of U jig-ami, or the 
local tutelary goJ of the family, and in many houses 
the ch;irms of the other Shinto deities also. 

* In a Shinto household there is a second god-shelf» 
or Kamidana, which is dedicated exclusively to the 
worship of f/ie attestors of the house. On this second 
shelf are placed cenotaphs bearing the names of the 
ancestors, their ages, and the dates of their death. 
These memorial tablets are called " Mitama-shiro," 
which means '' representatives of souls," and they are 
usuallv placed in small boxes shaped like Shinto shrines. 
Otferings of rice, sake, rish, sakaki-tree, and lamps ;u-e 
made on this second shelf as on the first. 

' In the Buddhist household there is, in addition 
to the Kamidana, a Butsudan on. which are placed 
cenotaphs bearing on the front posthumous Buddhist 
names, and on the back the names used by the 
ancestors during their life-time. The cenotaph is 
usuallv lacquered and is sometimes placed in a box 
called " Zushi," while familv crests are very often 
painted both on the tablet and on the box. Offerings 
of flowers, branches of shikimi-tree {lUicium religiosum)^ 
tea, rice, and other vegetable foods are usuallv placed 
before the cenotaphs, while incense is continualiv burnt, 
and in the evening small lamps are lighted. The 
Butsudan takes the place oi the second god-shelf of 



THE PSYCHIC LINK? 267 



the Shinto household, both beirjg dedicated to the 
worship of family ancestors. 

* From the foregoing brief description of the sacred 

altars of a Japanese household, it will be seen that 
there are ikree kinds of Ancestor-fVonhip in vogue — 
namely, the worship of the First Imperial Ancestor 
by the people, the worship of the patron god of the 
locality, which is the remains of the worship of clan 
ancestors by clansmen, and the worship of the family 
ancestors by the members of the household.' 

Says this writer, moreover : ' Neither the intro- 
duction of Chinese civilisation, the spread of Buddhism, 
nor the influence of European civilisation have done 
anything to shake the firm-rooted custom [Ancestor- 
Worship] of the people.' So here at last, it might 
seem, is the indubitable soul of Japan, unshaken, 
immutable ! Mtrt, it seems, may be the limit of the 
Revolution's law of arithmetical progression ; the point 
at which the advance of the Revolution is checked by 
an impregnable fortress, the heart and fount of Japanese 
origins, the unexorcised spirit of the race. 

I" or one of the large questions of the Revolution 
arises here, fascinating, exciting, momentous, when you 
have learned to wade among the profundities of an 
amazing convulsion. What is to be the bridge betwixt 
the two Civilisations? What link is to preserve the 
continuity of the psychic record of the race and the 
land .'' Where is the immutable — the necessary, saving 
immutable — of the old civilisation, the immutable 
which is and shall be at once the lever, the pivot, 
and the fulcrum of the vast efforts and enterprises of 
the New Era ? To question the necessity of this 
bridge, this link, this immutable, is to ignore palpable 
phenomena of history. Japan herself is wiser than 



268 JAPAN 

this ignorance. She knows and admits that she cannot 
here refute History, even if she would. She admits 
the need of premises to the argument ; she recognises 
a law of evolution. She does not profess to prove 
spontaneous 'generation ; she is conscious of the im- 
possibilities of an idealist view of ideas. In other 
words, she admits Law, which presupposes conditions. 
Of conditions she admits, nay demonstrates, that they 
may be changed, or permeated with a new principle. 
The antecedent ' accident ' of their existence she does 
not deny. She does not delude herself with a notion 
that conditions have an existence apart from their 
essence, their body ; or that, hence, their essence is 
merely a name. In a word, Japan does not profess 
to be re-creating herself. She professes only to have 
changed, or to be changing the order of her days. 
It is a Revolution, not a Re-birth. 

So then the bridge, the link, is not only necessary. 
It is even of the nature of the case. 

It is, it seems, in Ancestor- Worship, guised under 
many names, that Japan recognises or feels a possible or 
a certain bridge. Here is the antecedent essence of 
conditions with which she not only feels it necessary 
not to interfere, but which she feels it beyond her 
power either to question or to annul, under penalty, 
upon either attempt, of race-suicide, that is to say, of 
irretrievable disaster. Human nature is the antecedent 
essence of human history, is it not ? Similarly, there is 
racial character, race nature, if you like, which is equally 
the essence antecedent to national or race history. 
When national history, in a few millennia, shall merge 
in world-history, the latter will be merely a composite 
of all the assortments of the former. It will be none 
of them, but all of them. 



THE PSYCHIC LINK? 269 

Other names for Ancestor- Worship in Japan are, 
loyalty, filial piety, the national religion, the national 
soul, Shintoism. That is to say, Japan herself scarcely 
knows what it is, save perhaps that it is her life, her 
heart. Perhaps she here only raises in another form, 
in another aspect, our large deep question, — The nature 
of the soul ? At any rate she has, I say, all sorts of 
names for it, and many definitions, which for us make 
of it, whatever it be, an Oriental, the Japanese, laby- 
rinth, the mystical nodus of an Event which, in itself, 
is to us an Enigma. How might I, how might we, 
divine the nature of that which Japan herself is unable 
to define save in a confusion of definitions .? 

The writer, whose account I have just quoted, makes 
the Japanese Constitution at heart Ancestor- Worship, 
or Ancestor- Worship at heart the Japanese Constitution ! 
Says he : ' The foregoing statement of the facts relating 
to the Constitution of the Empire ' [a recitation of the 
Articles declaring the Emperor's prerogatives] ' will be 
sufficient to show that the sovereignty of Japan is the 
heritage of Imperial Ancestors, and that the foundation 
of the Constitution is Ancestor- Worship.' There you 
are, — Ancestor- Worship is the Japanese Constitution : 
the Japanese Constitution is Ancestor- Worship. 

Take again this description by a Japanese news- 
paper : ' The customs prevailing in the West seem to 
differ considerably from those in vogue here in the 
matter of reverence paid to illustrious ancestors. 
Especially does this contrast seem marked between 
Japan and her trans-Pacific neighbour — the United 
States. We were once surprised to hear from an 
American gentleman of education that his countrymen 
and countrywomen, deeply as they cherished the 
memory of the great Washington, would not care to 



270 JAPAN 

uncover their heads and pay homage to the tomb ot" the 
father of their country. Our surprise \ras subsequently 
removed bv the reflection that in the Ui\itcd States 
individu;disin is p;uMmount and family considerations 
count for naught, the descendants of any man, of what- 
ever ilkistrious serWces to the country, being esteemed 
on their own intrinsic merits without anv regard to 
their descent. Such is not the case in this country. 
We see quite a large number of men, many of them ot 
mediocre ment;U capacity, and not a tew below the 
averaiil^e stand:ird of intelligence, enioviiig atfluence and 
ease bv virtue ot the deeds of their ilkistrious fore- 
fathers, who floimshed in some cases more than ten 
centuries ago. Philosophers mav sneer and demagogues 
rail at what they consider an absurd and unfair dis- 
crimination in tavour ot that limited section ot the 
public. But the institution is an outcome of the 
particular organisation of Japan and of her peculiar 
customs, and, in spite of the sneers of philosophers and 
the denuiiciations ot demagogues, it \y'\\\ continue as 
before, though perhaps in a more or less modified form 
as required by the future constitution of the Empire. 
The reverence paid bv posterity to forefathers of distin- 
guished merit takes another form and gives rise to 
another custom. We mean the construction of splendid 
shrines dedicated to the memory of ancestors, and 
the homage paid by their posterity at them. Such 
edifices are counted by millions in this country. Thev 
are found by dozens in every thriving city, nor is there 
even a rural village or hamlet in the remote corners of the 
country but possesses one of a humble description. . . .' 
Follows a plea for the disassociation of the Great Shrine 
of Ise, the shrine of the Imperial, Heaven-descended 
Ancestors, from all narrowly religious notions. 



THE PSYCHIC LINK? 271 

Consider also this account by the one living alien who 
is the true adoptive child of the Japanese mysteries : 
* The secret living force of Shinto to-day means some- 
thing much more profound than tradition, or worship, 
or ceremonialism. It signifies character in the higher 
sense, — courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things 
loyalty. The spirit of Shinto is the spirit of filial piety, 
the zest of duty, the readiness to surrender life for a 
principle without a thought of wherefore. It is religion, 
but religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse, 
religion transmuted into ethical instinct. It is the whole 
emotional life of the race, the soul of Japan.' ' And 
also : ' He who would know what Shinto is must learn 
to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of 
beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism 
and the magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith 
have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinc- 
tive.' '^ 

Is it not a labyrinth } But also does it not explain 
much, — the difficulties of a Japanese Constitution with 
an Emperor whose removal from a divine enthrone- 
ment must outrage the profoundest and most ancient 
instincts of a people ; the supreme importance of 
the perpetuation of family lines, that a man, on his 
death, be not left to perish utterly for lack of a 
devout child to keep him, or at least his memory, 
green and alive within the ancestral pales of the 
national cult ; the sequent mysteries of Japanese 
adoption; and food -offerings to the viewless dead; 
and the cheerfulness (relative) of death in happy 
Japan, where this Shinto, this cult of filial piety, this 
devotion to forefathers, makes death to seem but a paler 

' Lafcadio Hearn'e Glimpttt of Unfamitiar Jafian. Mr. Hearn U a naturalueil 
Japanete. ^ Ihid. 



272 JAPAN 

life. And is not that, to the Western mind, crowning 
absurdity, the conferring of posthumous honours — 
brisk, usual, seemly as it is even in to-day's Revolu- 
tionary Japan — does not even this capital puerility 
become not only explicable and comprehensible, but 
even fit and proper by token of all that can be known 
or determined of a positive quality in this esoteric, 
progenital pietism ? I think I am a Japanese and I 
reflect : ' My father ; my grandfathers ; my ancestors ; 
of these I have been nurtured to believe, as I do believe, 
that they were Japan, therefore great ; that they are 
the Past, therefore worthy ; that they are the Present, 
because I am of them ; that they were the creators of 
this Paradise, the causers of this Me. Therefore shall 
I not honour, reverence, worship them, saying : " T(? 
forefathers of the generations^ and of our families^ and of 
our kindred — unto you^ the founders of our homes^ we utter 
the gladness of our thanks " ? ' ^ So the Emperor of Japan, 
upon a visit to an outlying province of his realm to 
umpire the autumn army manoeuvres, before returning 
by special train to Tokyo will raise one or two local 
heroes, who flourished in these immediate neighbour- 
hoods five hundred or a thousand years ago — the 
Emperor will promote them a degree in official rank. 
It is an honour to the neighbourhood and to them. Or 
if one of his trusty counsellors will die to-morrow, he 
shall be raised a degree before burial, perhaps after it. 
And why not, when you take the standpoint of Shinto, 
the national cult ? Is it so absurd if you adore, or even 
do reverence unto ancestors } 

It is not a religion. As one commentator in English 
says : ' It has no system of dogmas, no semblance of 
creed, no infallible book, no idols, no separate priest- 

•^ The Shinto believer's daily orison : Lafcadio Hearn's translation. 



THE PSYCHIC LINK? 273 

hood, no moral code, no promise of heaven, no threat 
of hell.' Yet it is a religion. ' Meanwhile ' (writes a 
Japanese) ' it can be said that Japan remains faithful to 
her ancient national religion. This she piously cherishes, 
at any rate, to the extent of the manifestation of 
reverence for ancestors and heroes. Every town, every 
village possesses more than one miya (Shinto temple). 
In 1898 there were 664 great temples, 191,242 shrines, 
and 15,983 Shinto priests. Each temple has its annual 
festival. Even the Buddhist believers take part in the 
ceremonies, and go to adore the Shinto gods. The 
festival provides a variety of entertainments for all 
classes of society. Thus it is not only a religious 
ceremony but a social custom which adorns life with 
pleasure and gaiety the while the Buddhist solemnities 
inspire only sadness and melancholy.' 

You will perceive that we here discover Ancestor- 
Worship in a new character. It is evidently the National 
Amusement ! 

It is also the bete noire of constitutional government 
in Japan. It is also the nerve of the nation's marvellous 
homogeneity, the central fire of its burning patriotism. 
It is at once the driving force of its politics, and the 
break upon its political development. It is its strength 
abroad and its weakness at home. Yet it is the inspira- 
tion of its heart, though it be the dust in its eyes. 

Consider this aspect of it as the nation's strength 
abroad, reported from the mouth of a Japanese ancient 
by that alien initiate of the Japanese mysteries whom I 
have already quoted : ' The old man answered with 
simple earnestness, — " Perhaps by Western people it is 
thought that the dead never return. There are no 
Japanese dead who do not return. There are none 
who do not know the way. From China and from 



274 JAPAN 

Chosen [Korea], and out of the bitter sea, all our dead 
have come back, — All! They are with us now. In 
every dusk they gather to hear the bugles that called 
them home. And they will hear them also in that day 
when the armies of the Son of Heaven shall be sum- 
moned against Russia ! " ' ^ What a task ! To fight 
battalions of the dead ! To move against legions of 
ghosts ! To charge embattled spectres ! What a 
war ! 

But the great question, deep, enigmatical, unanswer- 
able, puts itself thus : Is this thing to be the golden, 
necessary bridge between Japan's Past and Japan's 
Future } 

While we wait for Japan's answer in events, let us 
finally reflect whether this Thing — be it an elusive nothing 
or the Soul of Japan — let us reflect whether it be not a 
Thing for our envying, for Europe's, for the Occident's 
regretting ? For is it not the prophylactic of that disease, 
that canker, that worm, that insidious, baleful, repulsive 
enemy, that incurable, ineradicable, incorruptible, that 
mortal Life, that immortal Death, Oblivion .•* Oh, my 
Grand Dames, ablaze with the lustre of your queendoms 
of fashion, of riches, of salons, of courts, of bluest blood, 
and most ancient lineage, do you not envy the wife 
of the Japanese peasant .'' Is she not the richest, the 
grandest of mortals, for that she holds Immortality in 
fee } And you, my friend, ten times a millionaire, may- 
hap, what would not you give in exchange for this gift 
for which the Japanese peasant pays nothing ? What 
would not any of us, all of us, give in exchange for it ? 
To stay the approach of the monster, to stop his awful 
appetite ere his jaws may close upon us for ever, to 
appease his insatiate lust of possession, — even to make a 

^ Lafcadio Hearn's Kokoro, 



THE PSYCHIC LINK? 275 

brief truce with him, to bargain a temporary enfranchise- 
ment from the service of his appalling uses, — to be 
remembered a little longer than the herd — what price 
shall we not pay for this boon? But Oblivion is 
incorruptible. The monster will not be bought. With 
all our science, all our experiment, all our speculation, 
all our majestic triumphs in every sphere of knowledge, 
we do not yet possess the secret of this malady. We have 
not isolated the Oblivion germ. We have no serum or 
lymph to inoculate against this direst and most fatal of 
diseases. To-day it slays as ruthlessly, as pitilessly, as 
inexorably as yesterday and of old. And immeasurable 
riches, it seems, cannot purchase what the Japanese 
beggar possesses ! Plainly, there is something wrong, 
something awry, in the System of our Western Civilisa- 
tion, some wheel awanting, or gone out of gear, which 
the Japanese System owns or maintains in working 
efficiency. The Japanese cheat Oblivion ; they have 
blunted the sharpness of Death ; they have drawn his sting. 
This their worship of Ancestors confers immortality 
on the meanest, on the poorest, on the most miserable ! 
And we, of Europe, of the great, the conquering, the 
mighty, the dazzling West, we — why, we die, and ' are 
forgotten ' ! 

I think this worship of Ancestors must be the Soul 
of Japan, I think this because, translated, it means 
Immortality. For the soul is the immortal part of us, 
is it not ? 



XXXI 

HUMOURS OF THE TIME 

Some time ago you might have read in Japanese news- 
papers the story of a colloquy between Japanese political 
leaders of secondary rank which vouches the humour 
of the Revolution. I will repeat it, with names 
disguised. 

Mr. Yamoto, a prominent member of a leading 
political party, decided to secede, and called upon his 
friend Mr. Matoka, another member of the party, to 
communicate his resolution. Having heard it, Mr. 
Matoka rallied the seceder about his motives and 
professions. 

* You are always talking about civilisation. What, 
then, is civilisation } Do you mean wearing a high 
white collar [a " choker " as our youth say] like Mr. 
Okuba ? ' This from Mr. Matoka. 

' No,' said the other. 

' Then is it combing one's hair so smooth that it 
looks as if it had been licked by a cat .'' ' 

' No,' said Mr. Yamoto. ' I mean by civilisation 
habits like those of Europeans, who, for instance, take 
a delight in eating strawberries at home with their 
families.' 

* So ! ' said Mr. Matoka. ' Then the Japanese are 
essentially a civilised people. In Japan, however, 

276 



HUMOURS OF THE TIME 277 

strawberries are scarce, and the Japanese therefore eat 
daikon [cured radish] instead. The distinction between 
civilisation and barbarism after all, then, is only the differ- 
ence between strawberries and daikon. Isn't that so ? ' 

Here another leader of the party, Mr. Kando, inter- 
fered. 'Ha,' said he, 'I am fond of sake [rice-wine], 
but my children prefer sweets. If it be essential to 
civilisation that all the members of the family eat the 
same thing I must stand out.' 

Mr. Yamoto, upon this, made to leave, but Mr. 
Matoka continued the discussion. ' Can Yoguchi, 
your close friend, be regarded as civilised ? ' he asked. 

* Not he,' said the other. 

' Am I civilised } ' 

' You ! You are a barbarian.' 

' What, then, do you say to Takamuna ^ ' 

' Well, he's nearer civilisation, perhaps ; but he's 
too fond of women, I'm sorry to say.' 

' In that case, is not Marquis Toi [leader of another 
party], to whom you are now to bow down, also a 
barbarian .? ' 

Here Mr. Yamoto escaped amid the guffaws of his 
late political friends. 

If the humour be not indiscreetly obvious even a 
stranger to all aspects of the Revolution must perceive 
that it has its light moments ; that it enjoys a jest upon 
itself. On other occasions the joke is wholly for the 
outsider. For instance, you read this label upon a 
bottle of Japanese scent — 

Superior 

Lavende 

RWater 

Preparedwitagr 

eatcare erom 



278 JAPAN 

selected F 

reshliver 

Manufactured 

and Bottled By 

Gustav 

Boehm 

Paris 

Sole Agents. 

You read the label and you laugh uproariously at 
the Revolution, which has become an unconscious joke. 
The fact is, if you go about in Japan looking for this kind 
of thing, the Revolution becomes a perpetual joke, down 
even to the English of its bluest official notice papers, 
revised, it may be, by a Cambridge or Yale graduate. 
Judge it by its English and the Revolution is fit only 
for the comic papers ; it might have been inspired by 
the grand dames of our Caroline era, with whom it was 
a fine accomplishment to spell ill. In one respect 
Tokyo surpasses herself, that is, in the English of her 
shop signs. It is much funnier than is intended ; it is 
always more laughable than is hoped for. Of course 
the English shop signs of Tokyo, or of Japan, are not 
of the slightest importance to the present or to the 
future of Japan ; they have as little relation to the 
value, the success, or the failure of the Great Experi- 
ment as had Marlborough's original orthography to 
the progress and issue of the Flemish Campaign. A 
Revolution — what matters it how it spells in an alien 
tongue ; of what significance is it if it make chaos of a 
foreign syntax ? 

But for my part I think the Revolution only means 
to be kind. From the grave reflections and serious 
studies to which it invites you, it considerately with- 
draws you for some lighter exercise upon its mode of 



HUMOURS OF THE TIME 279 

announcing its newest insect powder : ' For Sale or 
Hire, Jumping Bug.' The Tokyo hairdresser joins in 
the kindly conspiracy to amuse you by ^proclaiming 
himself a * Head Cutter ' or ' Berbar.' The hatter 
amusingly masquerades as a ' Hotter,' and the furniture 
dealer sprawls lengthily upon his signboard as a * Con- 
fectionner of Fournitures for All Countries.' They 
are all in the plot, I think. The umbrella maker will 
not be outdone in the polite and thoughtful effort to 
divert you ; his establishment is * ANUMBRELLA 
SELL.' It is a masque of all the Trades, in which the 
dry goods dealer struts before you as a * General sort 
of straw hat Dealer ; New and Stylish Straw Hat will 
make to Order ' ; while the cobbler bears upon his 
front — 

Boots and shoes made to order 

and 

Repairig neotly done 

wite 

First class workmen ship. 

Even the lean apothecary has a sly hand in the 
generous jest, for you find that he appears with, * The 
most efficacious mabicine for wring the Political 
stomach, bowels scik and meny biscasas coming from 
vomiting anb sunstrkoe, etc' I think the apothecary 
must be a secret hater of the Revolution, and that he 
wishes to wring its political neck. ' Biscuit, The 
Wine,' is the small restaurateur's appearance in char- 
acter, and a considerable hostelry sustains the well- 
planned farce with a sweet intimation that, ' The 
Proprietress is well prepared for Supper, Cold Colla- 
tion, which will be provided in the evening, as per 
menu.' 



2 8o JAPAN 

Even severe and haughty Japanese officialdom con- 
trives to entertain you, to provide for you a little 
distraction from the racking problems of the present, 
the past, and the future of the Revolution. There 
may indeed be a doubt whether officialdom's intentions 
are truly kind. It is perhaps only by accident that its 
inte!itions sometimes issue in farce or broad burlesque. 
A provincial government, with a view to the improve- 
ment of public morals, not long since prescribed a 
head-to-heel bathing dress for all bathers upon a strip 
of sea -beach much sought by foreigners in bathing 
pants in the hot summer season, and by Japanese 
fishermen and others in nothing, at all seasons. There 
was soon a little comedy upon the strip of beach. 
Within the enclosure of the boating clubhouse of the 
foreigners these took the sea in pants. A poUceman 
of the provincial officialdom came suddenly, with angry 
gesture and remonstrance, to point to the immoral 
inadequacy of the dress of the bathers. He threatened 
arrest. With gentle urgency was he bid to look over 
the fence. There, over there, upon the public beach 
and in the sea were his compatriots, in point of 
numbers a crowd, and in point of attire, naked. Why 
did he not arrest them ? * They run away when I 
come up,' said my policeman. This, in truth, was 
but an incident of a burlesque in several acts. We 
had the little girl of European parents ordered home 
to drape her arms improperly bare from her wearing 
a sleeveless summer frock, and we had a Japanese 
policeman appear one throbbing morn upon our beach 
to show us how it should be done. He came upon 
the sands wearing a bathing suit of foreign pyjamas. 
So he stalked into the surf. Appearing thence he 
stood upon the middle beach, removed the pyjamas, 



HUMOURS OF THE TIME 281 

wrung them, towelled himself therewith, and flinging 
them lordly over his arm, strode homewards, stark 
as innocent Adam. The intention may not have 
been to amuse us, but the effect, its issue, was a jest 
of many days among us. Japanese officialdom has 
required the distracted commander of a great foreign 
ship to remove his vessel, within forty-eight hours, 
more or less, under pain of being mulct in the penalties 
legally attached to the offence of causing and main- 
taining a ' public obstruction.' The order to the 
distracted commander was written upon official paper, 
and it was delivered only a year or two ago. Here 
the intention to amuse was not at all apparent. Never- 
theless there was a very diverting joke made of it, 
for the great ship was officially designated a ' public 
obstruction ' by virtue of her having been cast high 
upon a Japanese shore by a great Japanese wind. 

In Japan you are liable to be entertained in this 
sort even by Parliament, which, as I have before told, 
but lately legislated against smoking by minors, the 
while the women-folk of the land have smoked since 
they knew tobacco, to their great comfort, no doubt, 
in their lean and empty days. Similarly, a longer 
while since — but not so very long ago — the abolition 
of cremation — the commonest and sanest disposal of 
the dead in Japan — was decreed because report declared 
it to be discountenanced in Europe, sublime seat of 
the beautiful civilisation which Japan had set herself 
to absorb. But upon receipt of a better informed 
report, signifying that the enlightened minds of Europe 
highly approved cremation, the decree was incontinently 
revoked. 

Well, after all, these things are like Tokyo's sign- 
boards and the stolen labels on Japanese scent-bottles. 



282 JAPAN 

They are like these in that they are nothing, or 
no more than the accidents of a great haste to be 
Europeanised, the uncontemplated antics of an attempt 
to achieve the Evolutions of a millennium in a few 
decades. 

I am more justly and perhaps more happily enter- 
tained by the logical antics of the Revolution. There 
is my friend who sought out a Japanese teacher of the 
language to employ him. Upon satisfactory credentials 
an engagement was made, and my friend made progress 
in the acquisition of a Japanese language. By and by 
he proposed to talk with people of the streets, intent 
upon probing the mind and secret thought of the 
Japanese People. But even with much knowledge 
acquired the task was mysteriously difficult. ' Mr. 
, it is strange,' said my friend to his tutor, * not- 
withstanding all your teaching and all my labour of 
learning it seems I find an insurmountable difficulty in 
conversing even with the common people of the street. 
How is it ."^ ' * Ha 1 ' said the tutor with some satisfied 
unction, ' I haf taught you high-class Japanese, what 
you call classic. You are gentleman. You should 
not speak like common people.' There is a Japanese 
barrister-at-law — also of the Middle Temple, London 
— who has expounded profound theories before an 
assemblage of juriconsults in New York. The other 
day he published a gravely argued article in a Japanese 
Review, proposing the desirability, if not the necessity, 
of firing every cherry-grove in the land. * If the space 
occupied by every cherry-tree were planted with a 
pine-tree the country would be greatly enriched. . . . 
Cherry-blossom viewing is not a diversion in which an 
aspiring nation can indulge in this busy age.' There 
is also the Judge who the other day heard the suit ot 



HUMOURS OF THE TIME 283 

the foreign proprietor of a Japanese mineral water. A 
Japanese maker was using a colourable imitation of the 
foreigner's label. The Court of first instance gave the 
foreigner judgment. The Japanese maker appealed. 
The foreigner asked an order of the Court, inhibiting 
the Japanese maker from using the imitation label 
pending the Appellate Court's judgment in the cause. 
The Judge refused the application. * It is winter- 
time,' said he, ' when there is no great consumption 
of your mineral water ; when, therefore, you cannot 
suffer much loss from defendant's use of the imitation 
of your label.' 

You smile, but, rightly judged, is not the unconscious 
humour of the Revolution a thing to be expected, that 
is to say, fit .'' To me it is like the Japanese Constitu- 
tion, proof of the splendid courage of the Experiment. 
I enjoy it nevertheless. 



XXXII 

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE REVOLUTION 

When, in pursuit of my study of the Revolution, I went 
to see the habitation, and for a brief hour, if so it might 
be, to invoke and hold high converse with the spirit of 
the Imperial University of Japan, in the Kanda district 
of Tokyo, I was set out to inspect the institutional 
descendant of what, says the Guide-book, was once the 
' Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings.' 
This was the style of the Imperial LIniversity of Japan 
a little over thirty years ago, and the style, by all 
authentic accounts, was accurately descriptive of the 
function. In pre-Revolution days — fifty years ago and 
less — the Japanese student who looked into a European 
text-book risked his neck. Quite often, alas, the risk 
became fact, so that the Revolution, no doubt, lost 
many a young recruit who had a marshal's baton in his 
knapsack and never knew it. Then the pre-Revolution 
Government, which was not the Mikado's, constituted 
a ' Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings,' 
meaning chiefly a bureau for the dilution or devitalisa- 
tion of the dangerous truths dangerously set forth in 
the writings of the leading savages of Europe — as J. S. 
Mill, Hegel, Comte. 

This ' Place ' is now the Imperial University of 
Japan, with Colleges of Law, Medicine, Engineering, 
Literature, Science, and Agriculture, and an ambition 

284 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE REVOLUTION 285 

to affront the world with its own triumphs in all the 
spheres of true knowledge. This fact is a more graphic 
description of the Revolution than it is possible to write 
with a wealth of adjectives — the most graphic descrip- 
tion save one other, perhaps, which, however, if of 
nearly equal effect as an illustration, is certainly of a 
less noble significance. By token of the Imperial Uni- 
versity of Japan — by token of its direct descent from 
the ' Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings,' 
the Revolution has sprung from a negation — that is to 
say, a lie, unto the very summits of truth. From being 
a despiser and contemner — nay, even an assassin, of the 
truths of the Barbarians, it has become more barbarian 
than the barbarians, more solicitous of the truth of their 
truths, more idolatrous of their majesty. Who would 
not acclaim this Revolution ? 

So I was visiting, as it were, a Golgotha, as it were 
the realised fabric of a New Age, when I went out by 
jinrikisha to the buildings of the Imperial University of 
Japan in the Kanda district of Tokyo. Here, where 
they killed, they now worship. Admirable regenera- 
tion, with a tear for the brave who died in the time of 
killing, before the glorious advent ! 

The fabric of the New Era is in brick, imposing, 
handsome, if somewhat irregular, and almost always, I 
suppose, in process of extension or rebuilding. When 
I was there they were raising a great new block for one 
of the Faculties, and pale students of Law besought 
their way, uncomfortably, unfamiliarly, among mason's 
tubs and lime pits. I walked under arches, along 
sounding corridors, in the semi-glooms of colonnaded 
stoops, giving upon calm, cloistral quadrangles. Against 
the light of windows opposing those in which I might 
look I saw close-packed ranks of crouching heads and 



286 JAPAN 

the silhouettes of restive professors. Quick feet clanked 
on corridor flags, and young men of twenty or thirty, 
in European dress or Japanese, passed me, scarcely 
curious. They were preoccupied with studies, and 
forgot to quiz me, notably a stranger. The habitation 
was all proper, and the air — the soul — fit. There was 
the deep, subtle, inaudible cadence of incorporate mind 
at work — the fit ' soul ' — and these were its proper halls, 
its adequate housing. The vast, low, humming of the 
revolutions of that superb mechanism, the human mind, 
filled the air, unheard, and the walls and roofs were 
commensurately impressive. 

I had my Professor to hunt down, and upon pur- 
suant inquiry ran him to earth — an Englishman with a 
jesting face and a genial habit after unthinkable years 
of the excruciating loneliness of a ' boundless contiguity ' 
of incalculable aliens — of such stuff are we happily 
made. 

*Well,' said he, 'you see what you see.' We were 
among the student draughtsmen of the Engineering 
College. ' Know anything about engines .'' ' He 
stretched a big sheet and held it out before him as a 
picture -dealer shows you a picture. 'Horizontal; 
sixty horse-power.' It was the complete thing, from 
furnace to fly-wheel, with the scale in a corner, and 
every rod measured to it in feet and inches. There 
were heaps of them about, of all sorts. We looked 
over the shoulders of youths at all stages of the game, 
laying the base line of sectional elevations, writing in 
the last measurement to scale. They did not trouble 
to look up at me, and I suppose the fathers of some of 
them were swaggerers and swashbucklers of the Feudal 
Age. 

' Come and see the shop and our new foundry.' 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE REVOLUTION 287 

The foundry smelt ntw ; it wasn't quite complete. 
The Professor took up a thing of plates and rods and 
looked at it with an interest clearly genuine. ' Blast 

furnace idea,' he said, * no infringement of 's 

patent. They do these things in their spare time.' 
He spoke nonchalantly, as if just conscious he was not 
speaking to himself, or as if it didn't matter much. 
'Yes, we'll give the blast furnace idea a chance. I 
think it should do.' 

Later, at the College of Agriculture, a few stations by 
train and a mile or two more by rikisha, from Tokyo, 
I saw many more wonders. I saw silk-worms nurtured, 
kept, housed, under the supervision of a Japanese Ph.D. 
as if they had been the germs of a new race of beings. 
All the paternal solicitude of the scientific experiment- 
alist was expressed in the eyes and hands of this 
Japanese philosophic doctor. Japan, you see, hopes to 
erect Sericulture into a science. Plots of the world's 
cereals were being treated with decimal doses of all the 
known combinations of silicates and sulphates. Japan, 
you see, believes that the agricultural potentialities of 
her soils may be multiplied many-fold with the aid of 
Science, the modern Magician. 

When I was leaving, a bundle of literature was put 
into my hands. I looked at some of it, at the titles of 
it : * Change in Length of Ferromagnetic Wires under 
Constant Tension by Magnetisation,' by Mitsuhashi 
Hatsugoro ; * Thuya orientalis at sea-level,' — Yoshino 
Mutsu ; * Absolute Messung der Schwerkraft in Kyoto,' 
— Nitta Hiroshi. They were papers contributed to the 
CoUege Journal, written and printed in English or 
German. Japan has joined the Modern Argonauts. 
She is out upon the great Mission of Civilisation — 
Original Research. 



288 JAPAN 

The students of the Imperial University of Japan, 
late ' Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings,' 
number well on to 3000, and Chinese, Indian, Malay, 
Filipino lads come over the seas to it, at which you 
might not be surprised after you had seen even a little 
of it. 

It was another day and other scenes in the great 
Bay of Osaka when, from the quarter-deck of a 
torpedo-boat tender we beheld a Fleet asleep — asleep 
in the heat haze, languorous, unstirring, semi-trans- 
parent, of a Japanese May morning. A cruiser at the 
far end of the Review line was a creation — a fancy of 
the haze. Just there, it seemed, the haze was dense ; 
and the local density took the shape of a cruiser ; it 
suggested a leaden -white hull, the shadows of two 
funnels, the thin ghosts of two masts and the spectres 
of two fighting-tops. The May morning was out 
upon a prank. In league with the morning mists, it 
multiplied the Japanese fighting Fleet by a sportive 
creation of hazy, unsubstantial, unreal cruisers. But if 
it did this, the May morning could not uncreate the 
battleship that neighboured us across the space between 
the two middle of the four Review lines — she at the 
end of the second, we at the corresponding end of the 
third. True, she still slept at 7 a.m., but she lived. 
Corkscrews of smoke, thin, russety, twirled upwards 
from her funnels, straight up, boring the cheating haze 
to find out and report how much there was of it 
between us and the blue. This — the smoke — was life. 
Little figures — belittled by distance — -appeared incident- 
ally round the shoulders of casemates and disappeared 
through little doors ; or they jiggered up and down 
ladders to appear and disappear among the stanchions, 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE REVOLUTION 289 

boats, rails, guns, ventilators, binnacles, awnings, spars 
of that lofty house of organised mysteries, the 'midships 
superstructure of the battleship of the day. The little 
figures were also life at 7 a.m. on the breast of the 
grey monster, sleek, smooth, confident, despising, over- 
bearing, that opposed our torpedo tender, ex-tramp- 
steamer, across a strip of smooth, oily pond, which yet 
dimpled mysteriously with far-spent heavings born of a 
forgotten gale of the distant high seas on a forgotten 
yesterday. They are memorials of a dead but once 
terrible Force, those mild undulations that invade and 
confirm the calm and the privacy of landlocked bays. 
As such they are a message, almost a story. 

An hour, and the Fleet awoke. Meantime we were 
yet a great little world by ourselves. The haze gave 
us a delightful privateness. But a mile or two off- 
shore we were yet well down the horizon, for the 
shore and Japan, like the spectral cruiser at the far end 
of the Review line, existed only as a deeper shade of 
grey. But the voice of a great city, its morning chant, 
billowed out of the greyness ; deep, remote, low, 
muffled ; reminding us that we belonged to the world, 
yet, by contrast, affirming our exclusive calm, en- 
couraging the egotism of detachment. I looked along 
the central ' street ' of the Fleet and said, ' We are a 
world ; we are the World.' 

An hour and the Fleet awoke. Bugles rang out 
and trickled like the music of fountains in a silent hall 
of the gods. Banner lines ran from sterns and stems 
to foremast and mainmast heads and from truck to 
truck, in the swift manner of lighted powder-trains. 
We were a Fleet, awake and ' dressed.' The morning, 
in league with its mists, had been waiting for this. 
With a kindly thought it veiled us ' undressed.' 

u 



290 JAPAN 

* Dressed,' we were fit to be seen. The hazes were 
already diaphanous; they but winnowed the sunshine. 
Soon the mysteriously heaving pond was a brazen 
mirror with moving indentations. The battleship's 
smoky corkscrew found the blue. The spectral cruiser 
was a silver-white ship of the Fleet. The shore, the 
great city, the mountains that looked upon it — Japan — 
became chromatic ; yellow sands, mottled city, black- 
green mountains. We were part of the world, yet 
a little vain of the isolation which the patrol boats 
still preserved for us, though we lost our delightful 
privateness. 

The Fleet was fifty ships at anchor in four parallel 
lines, three miles long ; fifty ships, five of them 
battleships, one, the biggest afloat, over against us 
there, upon this mirror sea, under this May-day sun, 
with pairs of gigantic snail horns thrust obliquely out 
of the fore and aft barbettes. Five battleships, 
thirteen cruisers, seventeen torpedo boats, ten de- 
stroyers, with coast defence ships, and other fry, and 
another fleet scattered on Japanese coasts unreviewed ; 
and this, mark you, three years since. It is another 
graphic description, another illustration, of the Revolu- 
tion. Albeit it is of a less noble significance than the 
University upon the site of the ' Place for the Examina- 
tion of Barbarian Writings,' it is yet wonderful, as the 
world counts wonders. 

An hour or two more and the western prospect, 
where, now empurpled, the haze lingered, loath to flee 
the sun's challenge, — the western prospect hinted the 
Imperial cruiser : her bow, her funnels, a spar ; dim in 
the face of the retreating haze, like the water-mark in 
your notepaper. I turned to look at the Fleet. Its 
decks were black with the motionless ranks of crews. 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE REVOLUTION 291 

come to quarters, shoulder to shoulder, rigid. I looked 
west again and the Emperor's cruiser and its escort 
tossed foam from their bows. Soon they reduced speed, 
and came upon us with the laggard feet of prideful 
dignity. The Fleet, the sea, the air, waited, silent, 
without motion. The crooning of the city at business 
was hushed ; the sun, I think, stood still. We were, I 
suppose, like a photograph of Piccadilly in which every 
hurrying thing is caught in the midst of its hurry to be 
for ever immobile. 

Bang ! The Salute began, the Imperial ship and 
escort yet a mile away. Bang ! bang ! bang ! — the 
quick-jfirers. Boom ! boom ! — the gigantic snail horns. 
Bang ! bang ! bang ! Boom ! Bang ! bang ! bang ! 
Boom ! Every muzzle spat balls, billows, and balloons 
of smoke, whitish-yellow, revolving, eddying, quivering, 
swelling, kicking, and these rose sulkily, and hung, and 
slowly put out long, large arms and wings, which them- 
selves grew and expanded until the Fleet disappeared 
in a universal, yellow, pungent fog. Bang ! bang ! 
Boom ! The Salute continued from fifty blind ships 
each blinded by its own fog. 

Then Peace ! The peace of Heaven or the prim- 
ordial world ! The Salute was ended. The smoke 
curtains lifted. The Emperor and his escort were 
within the lines. He was reviewing us, and the world 
looked on, mute, or only with a chattering on local 
quarterdecks which could do no injury to the wide, 
throbbing silence of the immobile theatre of sea and 
sky in which the Emperor's ship and escort moved. 

For an hour the crews were 'Attention.' The 
Emperor's cruiser came back between our midmost 
lines. Then, as she swerved to drop anchor ahead ot 
the heaviest battleship afloat, the black ranks broke 



292 JAPAN 

and, in the twinkling of an eye, there were empty 
spaces and hurrying units on every deck. The sun 
resumed his course, the strident cackle of the city came 
to our ears, pert launches broke the line of patrol boats, 
and we went below to pledge the Emperor and Great 
Japan. 

Afterwards we saw the Japanese bluejackets' ham- 
mocks, and heard about his meals and his drill and 
himself ; and an epauletted officer, exceedingly easy in 
manner, stated in centimetres the diameter of the 
Whitehead torpedoes he showed us. Doubtless he 
could have told us in milligrammes the amount of the 
charge for a torpedo five metres and a fraction long, 
but I did not ask him. 

A generation ago, or so, Japan, of the material of a 
Fighting Fleet, had only the men ; everything, that is ; 
yet nothing. 



XXXIII 

SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTION 

The Revolution unconsciously chose a ' psychological 
moment.' Consider it. It seems as if the Muse of 
History took counsel of her sister of Drama to decide 
the appropriate epoch of the new player's appearance. 
Surely it is the spirits of dead poets that inspire 
History. Who knows ? Eras and events so cun- 
ningly managed — as in this very case of the Japanese 
Revolution — betray the contrivance and the legislation 
of the perfect Imagination, with its magnificent instinct 
for balance, for compensation, for justice, for drama. 

Consider it. Is this not the epoch for the new 
message, and after a procession — the procession which 
has become historical tradition — of men with their 
message, might it not be a new, surprising, exhilarating 
stroke to present a People, a Race, with the message .f* 
If this be the issue of the consultation of the sister 
muses, let us be glad. It is something quite new. No 
doubt there have been the Greeks and the French, but 
it is possible to detect the voice of one man, or, at 
any rate, of groups, in all the thunder of their 
deliverances. 

The epoch, the crisis, is almost self-evident. They 
who hope, they who dream, look with increasing fatigue 
and a growing despair across the face of the world. 

293 



294 JAPAN 

Faiths have been crumbHng these fifty years, have they 
not ? And democracies, quite or nearly without shame, 
have shown us their cloven hooves, have they not ? 
Plutocracy is fat and sensual ; aristocracy is incom- 
petent and faineant. Expert taste decides that there 
is even a dearth of poets. The one light is science, 
but is she a light ? She enslaves philosophy, religion of 
the imagination, and in her duel with faith, religion of 
the senses, faith gasps with loss. In the wreck even 
romanticism is crushed or forgotten. 

The epoch, the crisis, is all but self-evident. For 
my part I do not doubt it. 

At the first blush it is fantastic to suggest a Japanese 
message. ' At least,' you say, ' wait a bit — until the 
Revolution be more fully accomplished.' Agreed, but 
it is at least entertaining to look for a message ; and 
our growing despair may take heart upon the first light 
of the new dawn. Let us hail this dawn, even before 
the first tenuous border of its nimbus has appeared ; 
let us hail it even if it prove to be only the false dawn 
of the East. Let us, by all means, get upon an high 
mountain, where we can see the deeper horizon. Let 
us, for that matter, imagine a dawn. It is possible to 
hope anything in the midst of Revolutions ; so let us 
hope all things. 

Besides the crisis there is the person, the Man, the 
People. There is Japan. I do not like to think that 
there is nothing in this fine conjuncture — the rise, the 
growth of the crisis, and the appearance of Japan. It 
is not in the spirit of Drama that there should be 
nothing in this conjuncture ; it would be an unspeakable 
outrage upon the unities if there were nothing ; we 
should justly accuse the art of the contrivers of the 
drama ; we should despair of the justice, of the poetry. 



SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTION 295 

of History. Our last hope — History, or the Spirit 
that is behind it — must then fail us. It must go by 
the board with Faith and Democracy. 

Taking the broad hint which the remarkable con- 
juncture gives — the conjuncture of a damaging crisis in 
our ethical, psychological, political outlook, and the 
apparition of Japan — accepting the hint of the con- 
juncture, there is, so to say, a prima facie case for a 
Japanese Message. We may mistake the prophet, but 
let us at least hearken unto one that hath somewhat the 
dress, if not the face, of the Seer ; unto one whose star 
hath risen in the East at the appropriate — may we not 
say the prophesied — hour of the night. 

Well, then, what is the spirit, the secrecy, the im- 
plication, of the Japanese Revolution .? 

Mark what things it is not ; what descriptions, 
formulations, cannot be used of it. It is not the rising 
of a people at the instigation of tyranny or injustice, as 
the revolt against our Charles I. Nor is it this revolt 
ennobled by espousal of a passionate Idea, as the 
French Revolution. It is not the removal of one 
dynasty by another, although an event closely re- 
sembling this was incident to its early commotions. 
There has been no ecclesiastical or religious urging or 
motive in it ; its authors and its children beheld no 
Heaven in their reward. It is not even a revolution in 
the name of Liberty ; for is it not one function of the 
Revolution to teach Freedom to its children to-day ? 
Almost, as one thinks of it, one is tempted to say that 
it is not a Revolution. Yet this thing which is not a 
Revolution has swept away a System of Government, 
transformed a People, changed the face of an Empire. 
It is not a Revolution, but it has accomplished more 
than any Revolution in history, with less bloodshed, 



296 JAPAN 

and incomparably less waste of treasure. It has 
brought a nation and a sovereignty from the Feudal 
Age to the Twentieth Century in four decades. A 
portent, if not a Revolution — a portent, it waits a word 
to characterise it if it be denied the name and style of 
Revolution, 

Lacking a dictionary term applicable to this new 
phenomenon, I shall call it the accession of a Despotism 
— the accession of the Despotism of Reason. Of course 
I am looking at it ideally, as if it had accomplished 
its task. Nothing could be less^true of it than any 
assertion that its work is ended, its programme fulfilled 
Yet to what extent it is an achievement ; to what extent 
it is and is to be a Revolution, and more than a 
Revolution, to this extent it is and will be a Despotism 
of Reason — the acceptance, in an absolute sense, of a 
divine Rationalism, as the absolute rule. Japan was a 
despotism before her Revolution ; she is a despotism 
after it. She has but changed masters, but whereas she 
had a man for tyrant, she now has Reason. 

In such wise, it seems to me, is the spirit, the 
secrecy, the implication of Japan's Revolution, and I 
am not sure that here is not to be sought and found the 
great first cause of its enormous success. 

Thirty, forty years ago, a band of men, supremely 
able and patriots, seized the State, the Polity, of the 
time — Autocracy, Feudalism, Insularity, Immobility — 
and, flinging it with their might upon the rocks at the 
feet of Reason — the rocks upon which she stands — 
cried to her, ' Be our Dictator in its re-creation.' And 
Reason consented, as she must consent, to the appeal. 
Reason became Dictator. She was enthroned. Her 
accession is the Japanese Revolution — in its ideal 
aspect. 



SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTION 297 

There are several wonderful things hanging upon 
this interpretation of Japan's Revolution. One avenue 
of thought about it leads to a Japanese Message for the 
crisis of the times. 

The theory explains nearly everything ; it suffices to 
account alike for the successes and for the failures of the 
Revolution. It does not, of necessity, touch the ante- 
cedent problem — how a band of Japanese men, almost 
youths, bred in the Feudal Age, were able to recognise 
Reason. Once they knew her, and having once made 
the first commitment into her hands, the rest followed ; 
but the recognition and the first commitment are 
inexplicable as the origin of speech and the rise of the 
first image in the human mind. 

The theory explains the ease of the Revolution. 
Other revolutions have sought or invoked Reason, 
without knowing where she might be found. They 
could but cry blindly. But the Japanese revolutionaries, 
they looked out from the Feudal Age towards Europe 
— Europe with its evocation of Reason from a thousand 
years of pain and bloodshed — and all that was required 
of them was wisdom of choice ; in other words, a just 
appeal to Reason. Ignoring ecclesiasticism, ignoring 
philosophies, ignoring the Schools, ignoring worships, 
ignoring even enthusiasm, they sought proved principles 
and final methods ; in other words, they appealed to 
the heart of Reason. 

Think what this means. I do not know that the 
leaders of the Revolution themselves knew what they 
did. What they did is almost romance. We — Europe 
— from a thousand years of pain and bloodshed had 
evoked and embodied Reason in a certain number of 
proved principles and final methods — such principles as 
the necessity of toleration, the sanctity of public justice, 



298 JAPAN 

the mutual responsibility of state units — such methods 
as government by majorities, centralisation of authority, 
delegation of administrations to trained experts, and so 
on — we had evoked and embodied Reason in a certain 
number of proved principles and final methods, but 
along with these we held and hold an equal if not 
greater number of dubious usages and habitudes — 
tradition, sanctity of the past, fear of innovation, 
ecclesiasticism, worship of pedigrees and wealth, and so 
on, usages and habitudes, doubtful and temporary beside 
the finalities of Reason. What the Japanese revolu- 
tionaries did was to select our proved principles and 
final methods and ignore all else — that is, to make 
appeal to the heart of Reason so far as we, Europe, after 
a thousand years, had had it revealed to us. Is there 
not a touch of romance here ^ We labour and sweat 
for a thousand years — we, the peoples of Europe — and 
find some good of life. Nevertheless, laden, bent, 
oppressed with many ills, the fruit of our labour, we 
but scantily enjoy the good we have found. But this 
child among the nations comes from the East and trips 
among us lightly, laughingly, taking whatever of good 
we have proved and employing a discriminating, adult 
judgment to reject the ill. Europe has quarried the 
gold of reason but the labour leaves her near incapable 
of enjoying it. Japan has it at the price of asking and, 
unimpaired by the toil of its search, extracts its finest 
uses. We have sown but we do not reap. She reaps 
where she has not sown. ' Nothing is stolen ; every- 
thing is paid for,' said Napoleon. It is untrue. Japan 
has been a successful thief and we all wish her well. 

In other words, Japan's Revolution has been accom- 
plished by a despotism of Reason. I repeat that I am 
viewing it as if its Jast task were accomplished. That 



SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTION 299 

it has much to do I have admitted. It would have had 
less had it made a completer resignation into the hands 
of Reason. Observe the conspicuous failure of its Con- 
stitution, and inquire if the cause be not that Reason 
has not been admitted to dictatorial, autocratic powers 
with respect to it. It seems to me that the fiction of a 
god-emperor is adequate explanation of the failure of 
the Constitution of the Revolution. Reason at once 
challenges the absurdity, but here the revolutionaries 
turned their eyes away from the light she offered. 
Her despotism was not suffered to be universal. 
Herein is the explanation of one, if not of all, the 
failures and shortcomings of the Revolution. 

The theory in fact explains the ease — nothing is 
easier than Reason when, as in the case of Japan, she has 
Power for an ally — and the success and the failure of 
the Revolution. Where the rule of Reason has not 
been accepted or not permitted, the Revolution has 
failed ; the measure of its despotism of Reason is the 
measure of its success. 

And here I am well constrained to give a thought 
to the might-have-been of the Japanese Revolution — to 
its achievement ideally considered. Was there ever an 
opportunity like to that which the Japanese revolu- 
tionaries have had.'' Able men and patriots, with 
limitless power, called to re-create a state composed of a 
pliable, patriotic, capable people — was ever an occasion 
such as this, with all the proved principles and final 
methods evolved by Europe before their eyes and 
to their hands.'' That they have partially failed to 
rise to the height of their opportunity — that Reason 
has not been accepted as an universal law — is merely, I 
sadly suppose, to say that the revolutionaries, though 
able and patriots, were human. 



300 JAPAN 

To me there is a Message in the Revolution though 
it has its failures. The message is both ethical and 
political. 

Ethically I am emboldened to look facts in the face. 
This is to accept the despotism of Reason. Spurning 
consolation from possible contingencies — as that there 
is a Heaven of reward for earthly virtue — refusing the 
inspiration of doubtful mysticisms — as that the human 
heart is the throne of Liberty — I recognise only the 
need of supplying every disability of conduct, every 
wound of circumstance, with its appropriate cure, its 
sufficient palliative. My philosophy of life is doubly 
enriched. I see farther and I see more minutely. 
The long result I am content to expect. The im- 
mediate need I hasten to supply. What knowledge 
there is I seek to use with every necessary speed ; what 
theologies there are, or what they may be, I shall dream 
of or amuse myself withal. I accept Reason for despot 
in the concerns of life, and it will be a sin in me when 
I hesitate to go or to follow where her cause and effect 
shall lead. Hesitation of itself will be a sin. 

Politically there are now to me two parties in the 
State, two politicians — the new Conservative and the new 
Liberal. The former says, ' Wait until it is seen if it 
be good for the people ' ; the latter says, ' Reason can- 
not wait.' Tradition, the past, its sacrosanctity, is now 
nothing politically, however much it may continue to be 
romantically. I ask only, ' Is the thing good ? ' not, 
' Is the People prepared } ' or, ' Is it contrary to recent 
experience } ' or, ' Is it expensive } ' or, * Is much effort 
required.'*' Japan — the Japanese revolutionaries had 
but one question — ' Is the thing good ^ ' that is, ' Has 
Reason approved it .? ' and they have come near to the 
performance of a political miracle. I believe political 



SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTION 301 

miracles to be as nearly possible of performance else- 
where if the test question be that which has been put 
to nearly all — unfortunately not to all — of Japan's 
modern institutions by Japan's Revolution. 

So I think I should say that the Revolution has a 
message for the crisis that is come upon these times, 
but probably I shall be misunderstood when I say that 
this message is merely a message of recognising the 
sovereignty, the despotism, of Reason in our human 
affairs, and of limiting the range of our active, disturb- 
ing anxieties to the execution of the laws which this 
Sovereignty, this Despotism, imposes. 



XXXIV 

WELTPOLITIK OF THE REVOLUTION 

At present it might seem that the sole * external 
relation ' of the Revolution is with or towards Russia. 
It is, of course, a fallacious and deceiving appearance. 
It is the World that is concerned. The affair is not 
Russia's nor ours, but, so to speak, History's. 

But the Weltpolitik of the Revolution without doubt 
has, for the present, its circumscriptions and special 
relations. It is safe to say that for the present it is not 
interested in any African hinterland question, nor in the 
Austro - Hungarian race crisis, unless in a remotely 
objective sense. For all that, it is a world-interest, even 
as the fabric of civilisation is one great economy ; one 
soul, one body, whose throne and government, though 
they may be a heart and a mind, preserve an intimate 
nervous association with a great toe and a little. 

'The focus of international competition is steadily 
moving towards the Pacific, where, owing to her geo- 
graphical and historical position, Japan is destined to 
play an exceedingly important part.' This is Marquis 
Ito in a manifesto to his followers eighteen months ago. 
He announces, you perceive, that Japan, or her Revolu- 
tion, if it be a world-interest only in an academic sense 
as yet, as might be argued, insists that it is and shall 
be a vital interest on the face of the broad, immense 

302 



JVELTPOLITIK OF THE REVOLUTION 303 

Pacific. ' Subjectively,' says he, ' we are already the 
heart and the mind, the throne and government, of half 
the world, and there are signs that this half may in a 
period, historically short, become the whole.' 

The Revolution, on its own confession or profession, 
owns in these times pertinent, direct, even instant rela- 
tions with the Pacific — that is, with or towards the 
empires, sovereignties, democracies, peoples, that look 
out upon that sapphire infinity. For my humble part 
I think it is necessary to admit this confession, or pro- 
fession as you take it, of the Revolution. You cannot 
over-estimate the importance of a miracle, nor challenge 
its pretensions. 

Well, then, look at the Pacific ; the sovereignties 
and peoples that peer upon its horizons — the Russian 
Empire, the Chinese, the Malay archipelago (a continent 
split up by oceanic canals), Australia, New Zealand, 
South America, the United States, Canada. Japan's 
' external relations ' are with these ; with all of them ; 
for that they are all members of the new, marvellous 
Comity of the Pacific. The Revolution academically is 
an affair of History, of the civilised world. Practically 
it is an affair of this Comity of the Pacific, its chief 
affair, I think ; its heart, its pivot, almost its crown. 
How splendidly Japan sits upon the map of the Pacific ; 
how splendid is the accident of her geographical position 
in her admitted theatre of external relations is open upon 
the face of the map. Consult the vast circle described 
by the littorals of the Pacific, and see how finely poised 
Japan sits, as it were in its eye. Almost, you might 
say, it is the Eye itself of this Ocean ; the eye of it and 
its containing continents. At any rate, admitting the 
convention under the illusion of which we think of the 
North Pole as the top of the world, Japan's is a fine 



304 JAPAN 

station in the forehead of the noble face of the Pacific. 
And Japan thinks she is, or that she may be, the brain 
of the Pacific. More than this, there is in her thought, 
as Marquis Ito discloses, a distant, shadowy future, in 
which the Pacific will be the World. 

Of course — yet why * of course ' ? — you do not find 
the importance of the Revolution, as a miracle, admitted 
or perceived by the Pacific Comity. ' Yah ! yah ! ' said 
a Member of an Australian Cabinet to me as our launch 
jibbed in a steamer's wash in Sydney Harbour, of all places 
in the world. ' Yah ! yah ! Japan is coloured labour, and 
that's the whole of it. 'Enry, tell the boys to come aft 
and we'll sing the Australian anthem for this gentleman 
from Japan.' And they sang it, or rather he bellowed it. 

New Zealand has heard that Japan is a very pretty 
country and quaint. ' Isn't it ? But it can't be anything 
so fine as our Rotorua country, or the Wanganui River. 
Oh, you can't leave the country without seeing them. 
You'll make a great mistake if you do. And there's 
the Southern Alps and the Otira gorge, when you go to 
the South Island.' 

Meanwhile Japan buys Australian wool for her first 
attempts in cloth-making. By and by she hopes to 
undersell English serge in the Australian market. At 
the same time she sends commissioners to New Zealand 
to investigate the land settlement system there, which, 
she has heard, is very successful, and therefore bound to 
be instructive. Incidentally she tells New Zealand that 
she should send commissioners to Japan to learn the 
first principles of the science of afix)restation, but New 
Zealand hasn't heard of her need of the science yet.-^ 
She asks the commissioners very seriously if the Rotorua 

■^ These very commissioners were in New Zealand during a few weeks' stay of 
mine there some months ago. 



WELTPOLITIK OF THE REVOLUTION 305 

country, and the geysers, and the hot lakes, are not as 
good as anything they have in Japan. ' And you must 
see our Southern Alps and the Otira gorge after you've 
been up the Wanganui River.' 

Japan is by nature polite ; Australia insists upon 
being genial. Japan is content to be beautiful ; New 
Zealand insists upon her own surpassing loveliness. 

Meantime Japan, besides that she is polite and in- 
finitely beautiful, orders spools and re-examines her 
system of land tenure. For her the focus of inter- 
national competition is steadily moving towards the 
Pacific ; and the Pacific includes the Southern Pacific, 
where are the Australian Commonwealth and New 
Zealand, one of which sees Japan as coloured labour, 
while the other hears that she is almost as pretty as 
herself. 

In British Columbia — which is Canada in the Pacific 
Comity — they almost succeed in being original as against 
Australia. There Japan's Revolution is Mongolian or 
Asiatic labour, whereas in Australia, as I have said, it 
is coloured labour. Australia, I think, says, ' Colour is 
race ' ; British Columbia, ' Race is colour.' I think 
there must be here a subtle distinction. Assuredly it 
is not the same thing to say, ' The kettle is black,' and 
* The kettle is sooty.' 

Down in Oregon and California, the United States 
of the Pacific, the Revolution becomes ' the little brown 
men,' or ' Quaint Japan,' or, when the American Demos 
shall raise his raucous voice, ' Mongolian labour ' again. 
It used to be ' the Menace to American Trade in the 
Far East,' and occasionally it is this still. 

Meanwhile Japan sends promising students to Yale 
and Harvard, and promising mechanicians to Pittsburg 
and Schenectady. Those come home to train the brain 



3o6 JAPAN 

of the Pacific, and these to roll steel and turn out rails as 
near to standard as_may be. It is hoped, you observe, 
first to meet the home demand for American rails, and 
afterwards to send consignments of the Japanese manu- 
facture of the same to China, Korea, Australia. Such 
hopes are not for to-morrow's breakfast, it is certain, 
but the Revolution, realising that the focus of interna- 
tional competition is steadily moving towards the Pacific, 
trains the brain of the Pacific, and spends money in large 
experiments in order to provide a hand and tools for it. 
China, incompetent, oppressed, despairing, blind — 
China alone of the Comity of the Pacific perceives the 
Revolution ; she most correctly appreciates its signifi- 
cance. By latest accounts there are 800 or 900 sons 
and daughters of wealthy, highly-placed Chinese families 
in the schools and universities of Tokyo. By latest 
accounts Pekin University is under the direction of a 
Japanese principal, and by latest accounts the central 
and provincial governments of China are more and 
more leavening their legislatives and executives with a 
leaven of Japanese talent and Japanese skill in the arts 
and modes of Europe. And here enters that large 
suspicion of Europe's — To what end, with what motive ? 
Europe, knowing little of the Revolution, or knowing 
with a knowledge that is mistaken, starts, as from a 
nightmare, when China collogues with the Revolution. 
I wonder if Europe, being shrived, would disclose a 
guilty conscience for explanation of this whispering, 
suspicious, self-accusing surprise upon knowledge of 
clandestine communications 'twixt the new Japan and 
the old China. Ah ! has not History its discoveries, 
its revenges, its long, patient, imperturbable justice ? Is 
there some canker of a distant Opium War and a recent 
Kiao-Chau Bay in the pathology of the ' seizure ' that 



PFELTPOLITIK OF THE REVOLUTION 307 

comes upon Europe when, she hears that the new Japan 
and the old China have come together ? 

Well, it is but a nightmare — upon certain conditions 
required by Japan, conditions which, as you will find, 
are almost guaranteed by the Anglo-Japanese alliance 
of January 1902. 

There is nothing so absurd as the Yellow Peril. 
Never was a bigger, emptier bogey. The human mind, 
when it imagines a terror, commonly makes it large. 
The human mind, under those conditions, is never, as 
it appears, big enough for itself. It says — ' I will fill 
the sky with my Fear ; I will make me a Colossus of 
Fright.' With the result, it seems, that there is all the 
more wind and all the more rags. 

The collusion of Japan and China means nothing 
more than that China begins to feel what a fool she has 
been. The pity of it is that she sends only 800 or 900 
students to Tokyo. This number, out of 400,000,000 
of a population, only shows, worse luck, how very little 
of a fool she feels herself to have been. Work it out 
to an average and you find that one in 470,588 and a 
fraction of the Chinese people begin to perceive that 
there is somehow something wrong somewhere in the 
Chinese way of looking at things. So the one in 
470,588 and a fraction sets out for Tokyo to find out 
what the deuce is wrong, leaving 470,587 and a fraction 
behind him in China quite satisfied with the existing 
order. 

* As to an alliance of the yellow races,' said Marquis 
Ito a year or two ago, speaking to a Japanese friend 
— ' Why should we ally ourselves with any people 
simply because they are of a similar complexion to us ? 
To dream so wild a dream is to confess utter inability 
to grasp the meaning of our new career of progress. 



3o8 JAPAN 

The scheme is altogether too belated and foolish to 
commend itself to any man of sense.' 

Is there more to be said ? How further prove the 
Yellow Menace a nothing ? How further prove a 
negative ? 

I might quote you dozens of explicit Japanese dis- 
closures of the precise relation of the Japanese Revolu- 
tion to China, and thereby constructively annihilate a 
nothing — the Yellow Peril. Let this statement by a 
Japanese blue-blooded Viscount to a Japanese audience 
suffice — ' China's feelings towards this country have 
undergone many changes in the past. Before the 
war [of 1894-95] they certainly despised us. After 
the war for a time they naturally felt sore, but being a 
sensible and practical people, they asked themselves the 
question why they were beaten. And they replied that 
it was because the Japanese had been Occidentalised. 
And so they came to the conclusion that if they wished 
to become a powerful nation they must to a large extent 
adopt Western methods. They are still more of that 
opinion now, and they feel that we can supply them 
with a suitable medium for obtaining what they so much 
need. They are beginning to see that a Western 
civilisation which has percolated through a Japanese 
filter will be a fluid more acceptable to the ordinary 
Chinese palate than the beverage taken as it leaves the 
fountain-head. An Orientalised form of Occidental 
civilisation has special attractions for them. They do 
not forget that in religion, in customs and habits of 
life, and in many other respects we differ entirely from 
Europeans and Americans. To assimilate themselves 
to us is in every way an easier task to the Chinese than 
to assimilate themselves to Europeans. There are 
benefits we may derive from intimacv with China. Our 



JVELTPOLITIK OF THE REVOLUTION 309 

population is growing apace. We want new markets 
for our produce. We want new openings for our 
people. China is at our very doors, and the situation 
there is not strange to us. Hence the country offers 
special advantages to us. My aim is to impress these 
facts on you, and to point out that the future of China 
is a subject second to none in this country.' 

In their hearts responsible Japanese statesmen fore- 
see the partition of China. At any rate I might 
quote you the undisguised views of one or two 
of them avouching their prevision of that cataclysm. 
The Yellow Peril is thus more or less than a nothing. 
It is an insult to the intelligence of these Japanese 
statesmen. Not that they believe partition to be 
the end of China or of the Chinese race. They are 
wiser than this. They see in partition a national dis- 
cipline and chastening, like the exile of Israel, to be 
followed by a reconstruction like the Japanese Revolu- 
tion. ' There is no guarantee,' says a Japanese news- 
paper, writing so recently as August last, * that all our 
well-meant efforts at aiding China may not be thrown 
away, and that China, we mean the [present] official 
China, may not even raise her hands to strike her best 
friend. . . . The Chinese as a nation may go under for 
a time, but they are bound to raise their heads again 
sooner or later.' 

And then there is Russia, the Russian Empire, 
Juggernaut of the nations. She also peers forth upon 
Pacific horizons. She would be mistress of the Pacific 
Comity, as Japan is, or would be, its brain. She is the 
present absorption, the present total engagement of the 
thought of the Revolution, though I repeat that the 
affair is not, cannot be, Russia's because it is History's. 



XXXV 1 
VIS A VIS THE TRADITION 

Never was a question between nations more simple, less 
implicit, than that between Japan and Russia. Never, 
perhaps, was a question with a future more difficult 
to forecast. And we shall perhaps go back to the Moor 
invasion of Europe, and a certain battle on the plains 
of Tours, to find an issue of parallel significance. Never 
were the causes, the elements, of a high political differ- 
ence between nations so plain, so easy of analysis and 
display ; never perhaps was a difference whose future 
course was a harder secret. Look at the contour of a 
mountain against the clear light of advancing dawn : it 
is not more sharp and definite than the historical neces- 
sity of the Russo-Japanese Difficulty. Attempt to 
decipher the shape of the same mountain in a cloud- 
oppressed midnight : with equal success may you chart 
the future of the Russo-Japanese case. In point of 
facility, the future of the case is in inverse ratio to its 
past. 

^ The author, in justice to himself, may be permitted to say that this, and the 
immediately preceding and following chapters, were written a good many weeks ago. 
He does not, however, feel that any material alteration is necessary in the expressions 
he used at a time when the Far Eastern crisis was neither so acute nor so prominent 
as it is at the moment of his writing this note. Whatever the issue of the present 
crisis, he adheres to the view that a Russo-Japanese conflict is finally inevitable. 
The only question in the minds of those who have studied Far Eastern politics on 
the spot usually is — the date of the opening of hostilities. 

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VIS A VIS THE TRADITION 311 

Korea is necessary to Japan ; it is essential to Russia ; 
and the spirit of final accommodation is, humanly speak- 
ing, impossible between Japan and Russia. This is a 
full statement of the Russo-Japanese Question. It is 
upon this basis, through these symbols, that the Japanese 
Revolution meets or establishes relations with the 
Russian Tradition. The case is sometimes called the 
Manchurian Question ; Japan herself at this moment 
names it the Manchurian Question. Nevertheless he 
understands the intricacies of the whole fateful imbroglio 
who perceives that Korea is necessary to the Russian 
Tradition, and essential to the Japanese Revolution, and 
in addition knows that the mind of ultimate accommo- 
dation is, humanly speaking, impossible between the 
Tradition and the Revolution. The Tradition despises 
the Revolution ; the Revolution fears dishonour before 
the Tradition, and, with Korea, there you are : you 
have the Russo-Japanese Difficulty, for a Russian Korea 
is the dishonour of the Revolution, and a Japanese 
Korea is the death of the Tradition. 

Nevertheless, simple though it be, it is, as I say, 
a remarkable, almost a phenomenal case. So easily 
understood it is yet almost portentous. A case for 
the capacities of the simplest mind, it is yet an epoch 
in History. Russia, how much we know of her 
and her Tradition, yet how little ! Japan, how little 
we know of her and her Revolution, yet how much 1 
Russia, what is she, what may she not be? Japan, 
what is she, and what may she not be \ 

The Russian Tradition has been long with us, or 
course. Yet the world, and England pecuHarly, is as 
little accustomed to it as ever ; we find it as difficult as 
ever to estimate it, to take account of it. We never 
seem to understand it, although it nods to us on a 




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312 JAPAN 

thousand occasions, and ever salutes us across a thousand 
lineal miles of buffer territory. It is almost a daily 
emergency, yet we never come to any kind of terms 
■with, it ; not even unfriendly terms. Can we say that 
we know it, however much we know of Russia ? And 
the Japanese Revolution ; we are now in some sense its 
sponsors, but how much do we know of it, how much 
is it possible for us to know of it ? 

Well, then, if the Russian Tradition be our — be 
England's — daily rumination and we yet come short 
of a working theory of it, and if Japan's Revolution, 
though we be its allies, be still, in some sort, an uneasy 
enigma, what may be the import of an encounter 'twixt 
the Tradition and the Revolution ? As a speculation 
this is amusing ; it is like trying to find, or proposing 
to find, the product of two algebraic surds. And yet, 
a schoolboy who knows his map of Asia could explain 
the Russo-Japanese Difficulty ! 

Nothing is more certain, humanly speaking, than 
that the encounter comes to war. This prognostic is 
scarcely a prognostic ; it is little more than an under- 
standing of the Difficulty. The real prognostic would 
be an accurate estimate of the forces behind the simple, 
unequivocal elements of the case ; an interpretation of 
their meaning, a measure of their stability, an exposition 
of their origins, an examination of their methods, a 
forecast of their destinies. 

Count Okuma, one of the men of the Japanese 
Revolution, said but the other day : * The Far Eastern 
problem is one which will not be solved in a cen- 
tury. The Manchurian Question affects not only 
Russia, China, and Japan. It is one of the greatest 
problems of modern politics, and it may never be finally 
solved.' 



VIS A VIS THE TRADITION 313 

Here the truth is hinted by a man who is part of 
the heart and head of one side of the Russo-Japanese 
Difficulty, — the truth that this difficulty is a collision, 
an inevitable collision, of incalculable forces — the forces 
of an extraordinary Tradition — a Tradition extraordi- 
narily successful — with the forces of an extraordinary 
Revolution — also extraordinarily successful. 

A Tradition, whose soul is a powerful, acute, 
machiavellian autocracy ; a Tradition which is as 
yet unbroken by a single permanent failure, meets a 
Revolution which has known no check in a course 
of momentous success, whose soul is the high hope of 
an unbeaten Asiatic race new-launched upon a world- 
career. Korea, the map, explains the collision, but 
gives no hint of its real meaning, nor any measure 
of the strength, psychic and merely dynamic, of the 
colliding forces. 

You are really then only at the beginning of the 
relation of Japan's Revolution to Russia — the Russian 
Tradition — when you perceive that war is, humanly 
speaking, inevitable sooner or later between Russia and 
Japan on the Korean Question, or, as Japan calls it, at the 
moment, the Korean-Manchurian Question. This is no 
more than to say again that Japan's Revolution is not 
Russia's affair, but the World's. Or put it this way, — 
that the encounter is between a Tradition whose methods 
and achievements affect the whole world subjectively, 
and a Revolution whose records and successes interest 
the whole world subjectively. Conceive — attempt to 
conceive — the portentous effect in international politics 
of a stoppage, accompanied by disaster, of the Russian 
Tradition, the Tradition whose extraordinary methods 
and extraordinary achievements are blazoned upon the 
firmament of modern history. The effect, the meaning, 



314 JAPAN 

of a check accompanied by disaster, to the Japanese 
Revolution may be no less portentous. 

There is, then, more than a war between Powers 
in the Russo-Japanese crisis. There is a collision of 
two unprecedented, unknown, incalculable forces ; an 
encounter of two enormous Ideas ; two Time-spirits ; 
two theories of progress ; two interpretations of the art 
of civilisation. And the issue — the ultimate issue — is 
doubly complicated by the witness of the origins and 
history of the two Ideas. Neither is wholly European, 
neither completely Asiatic ; yet both are Asiatic and 
both European, in origins or in history. 

For guidance I fall back upon their respective 
evident, or demonstrated, motive and conduct. 

This higher ground I know is usually ignored as 
irrelevant, and argument closes upon calculations of 
effective tonnage and trained battalions. I refuse to 
believe that upon this lower ground the crisis is resolved 
one way or another. Is it on the face of it inherently 
or historically possible that an Idea backed by a nation 
of forty-five millions which is as a phalanx for unity 
and has never known alien overlordship, an Idea which 
has already achieved a record of rare, admitted worth, 
backed by a race which knows the ' pride ' of this 
record and will die rather than surrender its continuity 
— is it inherently or historically possible, not to say 
probable, that this Idea should die or disappear in an 
unsuccessful campaign, or that it should be overwhelmed 
by the broadsides of a fleet ? 

No, I refuse the clue of effective tonnage and 
trained battalions, and for guidance fall back upon 
the motive and conduct, evident or demonstrated, of 
the contending principles — the Tradition and the 
Revolution. 



VIS A VIS THE TRADITION 315 

I have said my say about ' The Yellow Peril.' Were 
there anything more than wind and rags to it, Japan's 
motive and conduct might be damagingly impugned. 
But it is nothing but wind and rags in the present Idea 
of Japan's Revolution. What then is the positive 
tendency of the Revolution } 

A leading Japanese Review, writing a year ago of 
* Japan's Mission among Humanity at large,' gives these 
hints (I quote its own rhetorical English version) : — 

* Japan's progress proves : — 

' Firstly, — The so-called modern civilisation, nursed 
in the lap of the rich and fertile soil of Western Asia, 
after marching through the countries in Europe and 
America is making her way toward her home where she 
had formerly her cradle ; 

' Secondly. — The fact that before the sweeping in- 
fluence of civilisation, the great question of racial 
difference is altogether done away, and that the 
Teutons, Slavs, Latins, and Mongolians will join their 
interests ; 

* Thirdly. — When civilisation runs its course, bringing 
together all the nations of the world under its sway, the 
unity of the human race (which is now at best an ideal 
one) will be realised. These are the ultimate goals 
toward which civilisation is marching. Japan's mission 
at this juncture would be to act as the leader of the 
Asiatic countries in introducing the modern civilisation. 
China and Korea, for instance, can learn about civilisa- 
tion much faster and easier [from us] than from the 
countries in Europe and America, for they have common 
systems [with us] of letters and to a certain extent of 
ideas.' 

This, if you like, is a profession to invite confidence, 
— recall that there is no profession of a task or mission 



3i6 JAPAN 

sanctified by a revealed religion — but then there is 
testimony of conduct. 

In the record of Far Eastern politics, since the 
China-Japan war of 1894-95, there is, at the least, a 
Port Arthur against Russia, a Wei-hai-wei against 
England, and a Kiao-chau against Germany. Against 
Japan, with interests touching her existence, there is 
nothing. I am wrong. In the troubles of 1900, when 
for months it seemed as if the hour of the Chinese 
Empire might strike with to-morrow's dawn, Japan, 
one ominous eve, sent warships to Amoy, and by 
credible report even landed troops. The scramble 
seemed to her to have begun: she took measures to 
stake a claim in the Chinese provinces opposite her 
Formosa. This is her offence. Is this not testimony ? 

By almost unanimous witness her troops in the 
Peking relief were best-behaved among the contingents 
of civilisation. Her account to China, after the war, 
was for expenses only. Is this not testimony ? 

With the spectacle before her of the slow but 
dreadful approach of the death-agony of China, her 
ancient exemplar in learning and art ; with the apparition 
in her eyes of a gradual but terrible descent of the 
Russian Tradition from the north to menace her very 
goings-out and comings-in, Japan has yet retained her 
self-possession and has looked upon the aspect of affairs 
with an ordered mind. Is not this also testimony ? 

From the motive and conduct of the Revolution 
turn to the Tradition. 

There is a Peace Rescript and a profession of Greek 
Church Christianity. These for motive if you like, 
and I shall not suggest that they are a profession to 
invite confidence. Confine the survey of conduct to 
the Far East and the period since the China-Japan War. 



VIS A VIS THE TRADITION 317 

There is the ' inducement ' to Japan to withdraw from 
her war-gained territories on the Chinese mainland, the 
representation, namely, that the peace of the Far East 
should not be endangered. There is the settlement of 
the Tradition upon the vacated territories, an old story 
now, of course, — the lease, as it is called, of Port Arthur 
and its peninsula. What is this ? Are lying and 
robbery excessive descriptions .? 

Ignoring charges of connivance in, and fomentation 
of, the Chinese crime against humanity and civilis- 
ation in 1900 as unproved, there is the occupation of 
Manchuria. This — legitimate enough in its first 
excuses — was continued in face of the Russian signature 
to the general treaty between the Powers and China 
guaranteeing the latter from territorial spoliation in 
spite of her misdeeds. Secondly, it was continued and 
is continued, as the world knows, in face of a signed 
covenant guaranteeing its return in portions. What is 
this ? Are lying and robbery excessive descriptions } 

Again, there is nearly unanimous testimony that of 
all the contingents of civilisation at the Pekin relief in 
1900 the Russian was the worst-behaved. The best 
that is said of it is that it was as courageous as circum- 
stances required ; the worst is that its conduct was an 
alternative orgie of bestiality and barbarity. 

In point of fact, the agents of the Russian Tradition 
in the East admit everything, save perhaps the bestiality 
and barbarity of its troops. Their signed covenant is 
never other than a parley with circumstances, and they 
make it clear enough — they have made it clear enough 
— that they intend it to be no more. There would 
scarcely be a Russian Tradition were it otherwise, for 
it is chiefly its standards of conduct that vouch a 
new, untested principle in the Tradition. These have 



3i8 JAPAN 

rendered unto it its success ; they are, so to speak, its 
hitherto unchallenged Idea. There may be nothing in 
international morality ; it may be permissible to use a 
signature as a parley with circumstances if the signatory 
can do so with impunity. Who is to say nay ? 
Diplomacy may be entitled to assume the character 
of a brigandage wrapped in forms and armed with 
opportunism. Who is to say that it may not ? 

But we can have our preferences. I humbly claim 
to prefer other standards, and I humbly protest that 
Civilisation and the Twentieth Century — I shall not 
invoke a Peace Rescript and Greek Church Christianity 
- — are bound to prefer other standards. I humbly pro- 
test that a signed bond is a mockery of civilisation and 
this century when it is a parley with circumstances, and 
I protest that when diplomacy openly proclaims itself a 
brigandage, with opportunism for its pistol and forms 
for its mask, our century in respect of its diplomacy is 
the Fourteenth, or mayhap the Tenth. 

So, then, with motive and conduct for guidance, I 
look to see the Japanese Revolution succeed against the 
Russian Tradition ; that is to say, I look for justice in 
History ; I expect to find that truth is its own ulti- 
mate strength and vindication ; I anticipate that those 
standards which civilisation has agreed to regard as the 
higher shall also be proven the stronger. And this even 
if — as is possible — the tonnage and the battalions of the 
Tradition should for a time succeed, as have its lies and 
its brigandage. 

And remember that all that the Revolution asks of the 
Tradition is toleration and respect for its clear rights. 



XXXVI 

THE CLIMAX AND ITS PARABLE 

The Alliance with England is the climax of the 
Revolution. It is not the capital of the column, for 
the column is not complete. It is a climax, the climax 
of a unique spectacle ; of a phenomenon, if you like, 
unexplained, esoteric, inestimable. On the day of the 
proclamation of the Alliance, the atmosphere in Japan 
became charged with a new quality. The Japanese 
breathed a rare, electric, intoxicating air, come down 
from the skies on the wings of the proclamation. In 
the Japanese House of Representatives — their House of 
Commons, such as it is — men reeled, delirious, tongue- 
tied, their speech, if not their breath, for the time 
being taken away. They then went mad, even as sane 
men will on a tremendous occasion. The country, in 
sympathy, also went mad. It feasted riotously and 
drank deep. The Japanese, you see, have no indigenous 
or original mode of celebrating a maddening occasion. 
They say even as we say, — ' The gods having visited us, 
let us fill our bellies and tickle our throats.' The 
civilisations of East and West meet at some points. 

I was with them at one of their feasts, a strange, 
incommunicable parable. There were Japanese thou- 
sands all under the open sky, and many intertwined 
and fluttering pennons. Perhaps one in a thousand of 

319 



320 JAPAN 

the thousands could reason from our, the European, 
cause, to our, the European, effect ; one in a thousand 
that is, had spelt out a sentence in the English language 
some time in their lives. Once this one per thousand 
had had a gleam of the process, of the order, of our 
thought. The rest — well, I suppose I, to them, might 
be one per million of us who had peered, or tried to 
peer, into the process, the order of their thought. 
Nevertheless for that day and for many days after we 
were brothers ; they were my kith, I was theirs. But 
I could not communicate this extraordinary fact to them 
nor they to me save in formal words which really meant 
nothing. Behind the asseverated protest, — ' Now we 
are brothers,' there were a thousand years of strangeness ; 
of complete, unbroken alienation ; a thousand years of 
separate history with two continents and many seas for 
ever between ; a thousand years of far-divided, mutually 
ignorant search for the meaning of life. A common 
origin, a common mother, under some Aryan roof-tree, 
in the shadow of the awful Caucusus, we might have 
had ; but whither in the universal glooms which ante- 
date History, whither in our separated destinies since 
History began, whither had we not wandered, what 
farthest poles of psychic and political experience had 
not divided us .f" Yet after a thousand years, or ten 
thousand, we were met, and even as human aeons are 
long we found it — I found it — hard to believe, wonder- 
ful to think, that we were brothers. I wandered about 
at the feast, among its thousands ; frequently pledging 
the Alliance in draughts of good lager beer with my 
Japanese brothers, but always in a mist of strange 
interrogatory surprise at thought of my new-found, 
long-lost kin. It seemed incredible that these thousands 
should be kin to me, should be wishing well to a new 



THE CLIMAX AND ITS PARABLE 321 

fraternal relation with my country, in pot after pot of 
good lager beer, there, everywhere before my eyes, with 
the prodigious eras and epochs that had divided us in 
all the unexplored past behind and over us — behind 
and over our respective inherited consciousness. An 
inexplicable, incommunicable parable, I came to no 
solution of it, but failed not to drink one more pot to 
the Alliance when a fat tea-merchant took me by the 
arm and bade me to the booth where they were com- 
memorating an epoch in History by dispensing libations 
of Japanese-made lager of very fair quality. There was 
a terrible crush at the booth. In our zeal for the 
Alliance we nearly fought for the beer. An epoch in 
History does not occur every day. The beer, I may 
say, was free for the day. 

I mean no jest at the Alliance. On the contrary, 
I hail it with a sincere and ardent sympathy as the just 
climax of the Revolution. In one of its apparitions it 
daunts me, but that is nothing. 

I wish I might explain the vertigo with which the 
Japanese nation was seized when the Alliance was 
announced. This race, you must know, has practised 
self-control and the repression of confessionary emotions 
for many centuries. It succeeds well as the result of 
the long habit. Yet the Alliance with England snaps 
the curbing chains as gossamers ; and the nation is, for 
the time being, mad. What does it mean ? One thing 
or two. It means that the Alliance was an enormous 
surprise. Does it also mean that it was injudicious on 
the part of England ; that the Japanese were surprised 
that we should have proffered or accepted it ; meaning 
that they unguardedly or by implication confessed that 
it was a sacrifice, a ' give-away,' on the part of England, 
which, if it delighted them, also privily astounded them } 



322 JAPAN 

A German of erudition and some original capacities 
said to me in Tokyo : ' You have allied yourselves 
with a race of monkeys. And you all think what 
Cranborne said.'^ An American, much travelled in 
the East, of extensive commercial association with the 
Japanese, said, * England went into this thing blindly ; 
Japan is waiting to be found out.' 

Here, you see, you strike the same channel of 
thought which the Japanese Alliance -madness itself 
opens up before you. I repeat that I wish I might 
explain the national vertigo of the Alliance time in 
Japan. I feel persuaded that it has a significance of its 
own. If in one of its apparitions the Alliance daunts 
me, in another it puzzles me. The one may be 
nothing, like the other, but I cannot, if I would, 
resolve all doubts about Japan. I began by postulating 
a Mystery. I do not end by fathoming it. 

But there are appearances, shapes, visions of the 
Alliance that are nothing but pleasing. It is not to 
be said that they are now, or ever may be, substantial, 
real, quick. Thank God, not that the future is in no 
man's hands, but that it is in the hands of no single 
nation, no single sovereignty, no single Power, nor even 
in the hands of a banded continent of Powers ! This 
assurance at least allows us freedom of speculation. It 
permits us to make plans. It even invites us to hope 
that our plan may be the future, not the plan pigeon- 
holed in chancellors' bureaus in St. Petersburg or 
Berlin. 

Well, then, I for one am glad to think that it is we, 
England, who are sponsors of the Japanese Revolution. 

^ This is that unique pronouncement of a happily unique statesmanship : ' We 
do not seek Alliances ; we grant them.' Heaven preserve such statesmanship unique 
among us I 



THE CLIMAX AND ITS PARABLE 323 

I am glad that it is we and not the French, the Germans, 
the Russians, or even the Americans, who have shaken 
a fraternal hand with this People and their Revolution. 
To me there is more than politics, or the Far Eastern 
situation, in the affair. 

Bring it down to the hard, level basis of politics and 
the Far Eastern situation if you like, and even on that 
basis we have every reason to be satisfied. There is 
more than a modern Navy equal in its own sphere to 
that of Russia ; more than a modern army of half a 
million of men who can fight on rice. There is a 
Japanese nation numbering forty-five millions, six or seven 
millions more than the population of France, a million 
or two more than the population of the United Kingdom ; 
a nation whose territory has never been violated by 
invader ; a nation with splendid traditions of war behind 
them, and an opportunity before them, which they them- 
selves know better than the world, of creating a more 
splendid tradition of peace, even if that tradition of 
peace must be raised upon a new tradition of war. 

Yet I for one presume to scan a wider field than 
politics and the Far Eastern situation in estimating this 
Alliance affair. 

We are, I say, by virtue of the Alliance, sponsors of 
the Revolution. I do not say that we guarantee it. 
Japan does not ask us to guarantee it. We recognise 
it, and this is all that the Revolution needs, all that it 
asks, or more. But how much is this recognition.? 
What does it mean ? ' You have allied yourselves with 
a race of monkeys,' says my German friend. ' You do 
not know Japan,' says my American. 

What does it mean if not that we have recognised 
the success up to the present of an unparalleled experi- 
ment, an experiment which has no kindred or precedent 



324 JAPAN 

in history, recognised it when yet the rest of the world 
holds back, chary, doubting, suspicious, contemptuous, 
scorning ? The rest of the world says : ' Asia, all Asia, 
is hopeless, doomed.' In their hearts they say, * Let it 
perish.' We say, scarcely knowing it perhaps : ' There 
is no such continent as Asia ; there is only civilisation 
and the honest endeavour of nations to realise the ideals 
of civilisation.' 

We recognise Japan. Japan is the last hope of Asia. 
Elsewhere independent Asia is the sufferance of Europe 
or the jealousy and mutual fear of the units of Europe. 
Japan falls, and Asia, like Africa, like the Americas, 
like Australia, like the islands of the seas, lies prone at 
the feet of Europe, until the European Age has passed. 
Japan, so to speak, is the forlorn hope of a lasting 
truce and final peace between Asia and Europe, almost 
between Europe and the rest of the world. Japan falls, 
and Asia, the World, lies at the feet of Europe, but it 
is a world of vipers scotched, waiting the decline of 
the European Age, with a baleful eye of cumulative 
vengeance. Japan lives — the Revolution prospers, 
obtains universal credence and universal recognition — 
and there is hope of a constructive, final peace 'twixt 
Asia and Europe, 'twixt Europe and the world. Crush 
Japan and you sacrifice the last hope of this peace. 
Repression is fatal to all hope of this peace. The final 
world- content must be based on world -toleration. 
Repression is the logical and natural opposite of tolera- 
tion. Believe, recognise, admit Japan and you preserve 
a link for a treaty of constructive peace with Asia, a 
golden bridge on which representatives of the two 
continents may some time, some day, meet to sign the 
treaty of final peace, of final world-content. To crush 
Japan would be not to crush her, but to add a new and 



THE CLIMAX AND ITS PARABLE 325 

unforgetting, an unrelenting, unappeasable, implacable, 
member to the Asiatic conspiracy against Europe, which 
smoulders in China, in India, in Asia, awaiting the 
decline of the European Age. To recognise Japan, to 
admit her, to sanction, seal, and approve her Revolution, 
is to fan a bright and entirely permissible hope that the 
Asiatic conspiracy, in despite of all the past, will turn 
to a penitence, a following truce — for education chiefly 
— and a final consummating peace. The destruction 
— which could not be the destruction — of Japan by 
Europe, not her recognition and admission, is, in fact, 
the true and only Yellow Peril for Europe. 

This, then, — these fine hopes, this prospect even so 
alluringly noble — this is what the Alliance sponsors, 
this is that which, or part of that which our recognition 
of the Revolution means, that which it is besides its 
immediate place and importance as a factor in the Far 
Eastern situation, or in international politics at large. 
I do not think it is altogether a fabric of dreams that 
I raise. I look at the success of the Revolution ; 
I note that Japan is, despite her Revolution, Oriental 
and Asiatic ; I observe her neighbourhood to China; 
I remember that China already sits at her feet, that she 
sends her thousand students to Tokyo and imports 
Japanese genius to inform and reconstruct her tottering 
polity ; I recall that Indian, Siamese, Malay minds are 
being trained to think and to see in Japanese schools, 
and I know that Japan's Revolution cannot, will not, 
with recognition, consent to an Asiatic conspiracy 
because its spirit is essentially European and profoundly 
rational — I pass the aspects and signs in review, and 
I see no fabric of dreams but an entirely permissible 
hope. 

Is it indeed altogether beyond possibility of belief 



326 JAPAN 

that one of our titles to remembrance in the remote 
ages to come will be that we, first among European 
peoples, dared to recognise Japan, to admit her success, 
and first gave her the hand of fellowship when the world 
stood aloof, or sneering ? 

I like to think also that the Alliance is sponsor to a 
great ethical experiment. Why not ? Europe is near 
two thousand years old in the use of governments which 
at least profess to find inspiration, direction, nay, even 
authority, in the canons of a revealed theology. Some 
say Europe is a success by reason of its reception, 
admission, profession of this revealed theology. Some 
say not. There is, at least, an element of doubt in the 
matter, and, anyhow, our systems are often, by universal 
admission, a hideous mockery of the theology we accept 
as revealed. Here, however, is a state that professes 
only reason, a state that glories in its stoic acceptance of 
the dread verdicts of unaided, uninspired Reason. May 
we not then keep a space clear, so to speak, for this 
great ethico-political experiment ? There being a certain 
doubt — proven by many unlovely hypocrisies in the 
very midst of our systems — of the final sufficiency, the 
complete authenticity, of our real or quasi-theological 
canons, shall we not give room, opportunity, and time 
for the Japanese experiment with Reason, if only to see 
what comes of it, what its issue may be ^ Let me offer 
the most sordid of pleas : let us take a little trouble 
merely for the satisfaction of our curiosity. Let us 
note whether this experiment, which ignores theologies, 
resolves any of the hard problems which theologies 
have failed to illumine for us. It may be that some 
critical principle of life, of experience, of death, waits 
to be discovered by some such experiment as this. 
Wherefore, for the mere sport of the thing, as it seems, 



THE CLIMAX AND ITS PARABLE 327 

let us recognise the Revolution which is conducting the 
experiment ; if need be, let us guarantee it. The least 
we may expect is some new light upon theories of 
government, since here, for the first time in history, is a 
government which ignores theologies and enthusiasms, 
excepting alone the enthusiasms of Reason. 

So then there are other things that our recognition 
of the Revolution may mean besides a curb upon 
Russian aggrandisements in the Far East. The Alliance 
has other import than the strictly political. 

And even to confine the license of speculation 
to its strictly political import is not to deprive the 
Alliance of all appealing, inspiring significance.^ Upon 
the disintegration of China — which even Japan accepts 
as a necessary preliminary to the redintegration of 
the Chinese race and the re-inspiration of Asia — 
the members of the Alliance will have their portions. 
Let us then map and delimit a sphere for the trial 
of the hope of an Asiatic re-creation. Let us enter 
upon a joint or conterminous occupation of the great 
Yangtze Valley territory, from Tibet to the Sea. 
There let us nurse China, and Asia through China, 
back to life and knowledge of its meaning, — we with 
our vast experience, our allies with their intimate 
psychic knowledge of Asia. There should be a 

^ The author may admit that in this paragraph he rather gives rein to his fancy 
than opportunity to any germ of political sagacity he may possess. He may be 
permitted to say that he wrote before the announcement in this country of the 
' Mission ' to Tibet, now approaching Lassa. Though he cannot doubt that this 
aspect of the geographical position of Tibet in relation to what is really a vast Asiatic 
Question — the aspect upon which he here touches — has been pointed out in some of 
the numerous recent writings on Asiatic and Far Eastern affairs, he himself has 
seen no reference to it in any of those he has had opportunity of reading. He may 
add that he suggested its possible future pertinence in Asiatic politics over two years 
ago in an article in the journal with whose conduct he was associated in Japan. He 
subsequently found that at about the very date of his writing, a leading Vienna 
newspaper had also been discussing what to him, at the time of his own reference to 
it, had seemed a rather far-fetched, if not fantastic, inference. 



328 JAPAN 

secondary aim here. Look at the map of Asia. You 
will find that Western Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet, and 
Yunnan, or Southern China, make a territorial chain. 
Yunnan is the French ' sphere of influence ' in China. 
Upon disintegration it will be the portion of France. 
Western Siberia is Russian. Mongolia and Tibet are 
nominally China's and really nobody's ; but Russia and 
France have already beckoned to each other across that 
wide, mysterious expanse. Russia floods Mongolia 
with her Cossacks ; she receives missions from the 
Dalai Llama of Lassa and returns them ; France 
pushes northwards from Tonkin and Yunnan. The 
idea, the policy, is born ; and athwart the broad face of 
Asia a Russo-French barrier is threatened. But look 
again at the map of Asia. Observe that India, Tibet, 
and the Yangtze Valley make a territorial chain. Why 
not ? Are not our interest and the Japanese sufficient 
to stand against Tibet and the Yangtze Valley upon the 
great day and reckoning of disintegration. And we 
shall have met, Farthest West and Farthest East, 
imperial token surely of the final understanding and 
peace of Europe and Asia when together we shall have 
brought China and Asia to light and to life ! 




ADDRESSES— ACCEPTED AND REJECTED. 
[A Japanese newspaper's view of the Alliance with England.] 



XXXVII 

THE CRISIS 

*The dignity with which Japan has comported herself 
through these momentous negotiations, her calmness and 
and her resolution, compel even her enemies' admira- 
tion.' On the whole, the World agrees with the Peking 
correspondent of the Times. He adds : ' Her position 
in Peking to-day is remarkable, and the change in the 
attitude of China is striking.' Might not more be 
said } As that Japan's position in the world, if not, by 
her behaviour in the Crisis, rendered * remarkable,' has, 
at the least, been raised ; her repute increased, with a 
solid accretion of respect, if not of prestige } Japan, it 
seems, has not ceased to surprise the World. 

There is a refining discipline of these * crises ' ; not, 
perhaps, the searching discipline of War, but an im- 
proving, heartening, tonic discipline, if their trials be 
mastered and their temptations avoided. The World, 
with an appreciable unanimity, agrees that Japan has 
accommodated the trials and repudiated the temptations 
of her Crisis. And perhaps it should not be set down 
to prejudice if one should say that by this accommoda- 
tion and this repudiation Japan has succeeded — already 
succeeded — as against Russia. Certainly she has in- 
creased her repute while Russia's is, at the best, what it 
was — no more, no less. 

329 



330 JAPAN 

Of course there is more than one point of view. 
Japan — her Government, if not her people — is conscious 
that she is still ' on trial ' before the world. In the rare 
regions where that singular, that intangible, yet most 
real form of power, international prestige, is gained and 
lost, there the candidate, the accused, is presumed to be 
guilty — that is to say, weak — until he has proved himself 
innocent — that is to say, strong. Japan — her Govern- 
ment — is aware of and accepts these peculiar conditions. 
She is conscious that she is still ' on trial ' before the 
greater part of the world, and her enemies may there- 
fore, with a germ of truth in their allegation, accuse 
' her dignity, her calmness, and her resolution,' as if 
they were merely artificial. Japan and her friends 
might reply, if they cared, that she has but wished to 
defer to the opinion and to the standards of Europe, 
and then they might ask whether this be a fault. 

There was a usefully candid display of the Japanese 
— not the Japanese Government's — view of the case 
in a Tokyo journal of a few weeks back. This journal 
in its ' English column ' — a feature of some of the 
leading Japanese newspapers — says : ' Major -General 
Iguchi is credited with having recently uttered the 
following observation : " As an individual, the Japanese 
is a liar ; as a nation he is too honest, — just the very 
opposite of the Westerner." All keen observers of our 
Government and people will admit that there is much 
truth in the saying. Although our countrymen have 
earned an unenviable reputation of being the most 
untrustworthy people on earth, our Government has 
always been scrupulously honest ; in fact, we do not 
know a single instance where our Government has been 
condemned by foreigners for bad faith. Our Govern- 
ment has been and is too sensitive to foreign criticisms, 



THE CRISIS 331 



and dares not act in a way which might bring discredit 
upon its name.' And the journal goes on to urge that 
Japan will use Russian weapons against Russia, that, as 
it puts the matter, ' our diplomatists will cast aside 
simple honesty for a while, and meet falsehood with 
falsehood.' 

Upon the evidence of this disclosure, it is open to 
Japan's enemies, even to her friends, to say that her 
fine behaviour in the Crisis has been the fine behaviour 
of the Japanese Government, not of the Japanese people. 
And yet, must this be held a shameful admission .? Is 
the case so very different in Western Europe — in 
Germany during the South African War, in France at 
the Fashoda crisis, in England upon Ladysmith and 
Mafeking relief days ? Undoubtedly the Japanese 
people would have spoiled the Japanese Government's 
fine harvest of reputation from the Crisis, if it could. 
A notable English journal of Japan analyses the popular 
Japanese view and opinion in October last. 'Almost 
without exception ' (it says) ' the vernacular journals 
appear to hold that a war with Russia is sooner or later 
inevitable, and that any delay will only place Japan in a 
worse position to contend with the forces opposed to 
her than is the case at present. One and all, from 
journals of the severely scholarly type to journals which 
depend on the lowest form of cheap sensationalism for 
their existence — one and all appear to look upon a war 
with Russia, if not with a light heart, at all events with 
considerable equanimity and a firm belief that Japan 
will come out of the struggle right side uppermost. If, 
therefore, we are to regard the Press as representative 
of the people ' [the writer of the article has just argued 
that we can], * it would seem only too evident that the 
great majority of the nation is in favour of a warlike 



332 JAPAN 

policy on the part of the Government, and would view 
with strong resentment any drawing back. Again, if 
we turn from the Press to the platform, the same 
practical unanimity is to be observed. Where meetings 
have been held, they seem invariably to have been not 
only patriotic but Chauvinist, and if the advice of these 
amateur politicians had been taken Japan would have 
been at war long ago.' ^ The House of Representa- 
tives, a day or two after the opening — on the very day 
of the official opening — of its session in December, 
passed a unanimous censure upon the Government's 
conduct of the Crisis, and the Diet was at once 
dissolved. So we may admit that it is the Japanese 
Government's dignity, calmness, and resolution that 
even Japan's enemies have admired ; not so clearly the 
dignity, calmness, and resolution of the Japanese people. 
Yet again, is it so different in Western Europe — in 
Great Britain, in France, in Germany? Moreover, is 
it not a conviction of inevitable war rather than a 
passion of war desired of which the Japanese People have 
been guilty ? One who writes in this strain should not 
at once be set down a special pleader. There are the 
facts, especially the fact that Japan has been a great 
surprise all along. 

However, there remains, as patent issue of the Crisis, 
Japan's new accretion of respect among the nations. 

This profit has been secured by the Japanese Govern- 
ment in spite of the Japanese People. This means that 
the profit to the Japanese State has been accompanied 
by loss to the Japanese Constitution — a point about 
which the world cares nothing, but of great importance 
to Japan, to the future of constitutional government 
there, in which, possibly, is the future of Japan. 

' Japan Chronicle^ October 21. 



THE CRISIS 333 



The loss to the Japanese Constitution occurs because 
the Crisis has been managed, is at this moment being 
managed, by a wholly unconstitutional, unrepresentative 
authority, the Elder Statesmen, the ruling Oligarchy, 
whose place and power in the Japanese polity I have 
attempted in a section of this book to define and 
describe. Had the Japanese popular, representative 
view been translated or embodied in the Japanese policy, 
war would have been several months in progress by 
now, and incidentally the harvest of international esteem 
would have been lost. The Japanese representative 
House unanimously censured the Japanese Government's 
policy. The Government did not resign, the ultimate 
reason being that it is not the Government, but the 
Elder Statesmen — the unconstitutional Oligarchy — who 
are, or who make, the Japanese policy. The Crisis, as 
I say, has been managed by the Oligarchy. Further, 
it is necessary that the Oligarchy should continue to 
manage it. Hence the Government merely dissolved 
the House of Representatives, and went on as before. 
No outsider need presume to ' take sides ' in such an 
affair. I do not. I merely point out the facts, germane 
as they are to a task of making the Japan of the moment 
understood, so far as that may be possible. 

Constitutional government has been losing ground in 
Japan for several years. It has been losing so much 
ground that, while the present Crisis was still young, 
it was nearly, if not quite, a blank failure. The 
Crisis has confirmed this failure ; if not, as it were, 
stereotyped it. 

Well, this is the other side of that shield of ' dignity, 
calmness, and resolution,' which has justly elicited the 
admiration even of Japan's enemies. It is ' another 
side ' which, in a book of this character, could hardly 



334 JAPAN 

be ignored, however little the world, absorbed, rightly 
absorbed, by other grimly fascinating aspects of the 
Crisis, may care about its being pointed out. 

Fortunately the Crisis is recognised in its large 
aspects — portentous aspects, may not one say ? For- 
tunately it is seen as a vast, enormous Question. 
Fortunately it is recognised that it is not Russia's 
concern, but the World's. Fortunately it is seen as at 
least probable History, not merely an incident of Far 
Eastern politics. 

But the only facts realised from it, as I write, are a 
certain accretion of prestige to Japan, and a certain — 
certain in a different sense — a certain loss of prestige to 
Japan's Constitution. Japan, as an international State, 
as a member of what is called the Comity of Nations, 
has benefited from the disciplines of the Crisis. Japan, 
as a constitutional State, has suffered. 

As this book issues from the press Japan throws 
down the gage of battle. So, it seems, she is neither 
unprepared nor unwilling to pass from the disciplines 
of the Crisis into the more searching disciplines of 
War. 



POSTSCRIPT TO SECOND EDITION 

In the opening phases of the war with Russia, beginning a few 
days after the first publication of this book, Japan much more 
than justified every attribute of eulogy which the author, in 
the course of a conscientious survey of its achievements and its 
failures, was impelled to use of the great definitive fact of 
Asiatic history which he has named the Japanese Revolution. 
The occasion is too grave for the writer with real propriety to 
indulge in a merely fanciful task — which otherwise would not 
lack its fascinations — of attempting to forecast the further 
progress of the struggle. Besides, is not the gift of prophecy 
a regretted anachronism ? All of practical observation that the 
author wishes to pass upon Japan's success in the war up to 
the time at which he writes — her success in the sea campaign, 
that is — is this, that probably in no sphere or phase of human 
enterprise is the Japan of to-day — the Japan of the Revolution 
— so competent to act up to a high standard of efficiency as 
in that of war. It is the same thing to say that in no class, 
no department, of human effort, is she likely at present to 
achieve the success she has achieved, and may yet more achieve, 
in war. In the humane enterprises of modern science ; in the 
improving exercises of speculative thought ; in the beautiful 
aspirations of art ; in the sublime inspirations of the religious 
impulse — in all of these, regarded as spheres of human activity, 
Japan must as yet be content to see one, two, or more of the 
agonists achieving a success or recording a triumph which she 
may, at the most, expect only from further effort and the future. 
In war it is different. Russia, in fact, has encountered — she 
has attacked — the Japanese Revolution at its strongest point. 
Unwittingly she has in this war broken an elementary rule of 
war. The strength and sinew, the major portion of the thought- 

335 



336 JAPAN 

energy and of the material resource of the Japanese revolution- 
aries has been spent in the task of training, arming, inspiring the 
Revolution to the end of its own defence. The reason is easily 
stated. It was necessary that this should be so. The fact of 
the war proves the necessity. At the same time there is this 
obvious inference — that the efficiency and the success of the 
Japanese Revolution are not to be imagined upon the scale of the 
efficiency and the success of the Japanese Fleet. The Revolution 
is, in fact, terribly lop-sided. The Japanese Navy is an illustrious 
creation. But there is hideous chaos elsewhere. Yet, challenged 
at its point of greatest strength, one may the better hope of the 
answering success of the Revolution. * And,' said the leading 
Japanese newspaper in the opening days of the war, ' supposing 
we are able, with the countenance of Heaven, to emerge 
victorious from the terrible struggle, not only shall we be able 
to fulfil our onerous mission of diffusing the light of civiUsation 
through the Far East, but we may hope to have earned, in 
redoubled measure, the respect of the world as well as the 
award of a chapter, devoted to our labours, in the universal 
history of human enlightenment.' In the midst of the dis- 
traction and the tumult of war Japan's Revolution can thus 
speak with the very accent of the angel of peace — some surety, 
perhaps, of future triumphs in the arts of peace comparable to 
present successes in the art of war. 



THE END 



029 979 166 A 



